


Etched in Salt (is a cathedral of the world)

by HelloAmHere



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, American AU because kind of an FBI crimes AU, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Parenting, Crime Solving AU, M/M, Mild D/S elements, Snowed In, Supernatural Elements, Telepathy, Touch Deprivation, and utterly madeup federal procedures, but also good parenting, difficult childhoods implied but not shown, do please glance at that, the excessive healing properties of Great British Bake Off, the other title for this could've been 'infj problems', this resulted from me watching too much hannibal but it's not really a hannibal au but maybe, very unrealistic crime procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-01 20:36:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17250989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: Louis asks for very few things in life, and they are: to solve cases, to keep bad people from doing their bad things, to get good coffee, to go home to a spacious apartment with nobody else in it, and to manage his stupid telempathy powers with minimal interference. And now he's stuck in a tiny cabin in a snowstorm in the middle of god-awful-nowhere with Harry Styles. Because of course he is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Ellen Hinsey for ripping the beautiful line from her poem "On a Short History of Chance" to title this ludicrous and lurid tale, do read that poem. 
> 
> To everybody else; this is rather like my usual stuff in that it's about dealing with feelings, but it's rather less like my usual stuff in that it's got a darker, thriller vibe to it and some complicated stuff with people in constrained circumstances and weird powers. I struggled to figure out how to tag it but I guess just, be wary if this kind of Hannibal-esque tone feels triggery to you. There is some consideration of power and some use of it. There is definitely strong implication of unhappy childhoods. There is potentially invasive-feeling danger and psychic stuff that's nonconsensual, but not sexual. All sexual stuff is consensual, but there's physical intimacy that's mutually constrained (on the level of like, bedsharing tropes). None of this was triggery to me personally but it could be to someone else as with everything. Please take good care of yourself. There is no graphic violence.

“I refuse to accept this version of reality,” Louis says, staring at the ceiling of the finest accommodation that Rural Route 987b (or c, as this is a matter of some discrepancy between neighboring townships, engaged in a war fought slowly through route commissions and passive aggressive faxes exchanged once every six months) has to offer. 

“What a surprise,” Harry says, dead in every tone. “What an utter, absolute, and thorough surprise. Every fiber of my body is surprised.” 

“Every fiber of your body should be focused on getting us out of here, if only you could focus on doing your job, which of course you can't. When do you ever?” Louis says. The ceiling is pock-marked with indistinct eighties decisions made of artex and regret, like the low hills of a town that pretends it has hills high enough to be called mountains but doesn’t. Rural Route 987b/c never pretended; they never even bothered to give it a name.

Harry says nothing. He sprawls loudly, on his stomach on the grey couch that takes up all the wall of the miniscule cabin. His shoulders stretch out the thin fabric of a blue waffle shirt. 

Louis looks back up at the ceiling. Harry does his job perfectly, of course. Harry’s stacked his chin on top of a neat pile of manilla folders while he flicks through texts from Liam that Louis can’t see, but can imagine. 

“Well. It sounds like I could arrange a helicopter, if you really think you need it,” Harry says at last. “That’s the only way we’re getting out of Canyon Falls.” 

“Canyon Falls,” Louis says thoughtfully. “Do the falls go into the canyon?”

“They're apocryphal, a reference to some Christian founders’ belief about the _waterfall of grace,_ ” Harry says, glaring over folders, because he's explained this three times. Louis is counting the number of times he can force Harry to explain it. 

Louis bites at a hangnail. “Lots of places to dump a body down a canyon waterfall. And they couldn't even get that right. I mean pick a feature, guys.” 

There hadn't been a body in the canyon. It had been a relief that made Louis weak, behind the rental car where he'd made them stop on the side of the lookout point, hand gripped so hard on the metal ridge of the hood ornament that he could still feel the line. 

The ceiling is lower than Louis would like it to be. Louis likes space, likes high arched ceilings as in Gothic-looking churches, likes open floor, modern loft apartments hundreds of miles away from here, fully automated with a system of remote-controlled appliances that took him months to finally configure into the perfect set of low response, low effort cues, cocooning him in a quiet, monastic grey. There is hardly any space here and already, he feels a headache behind his left ear, down on the hump of bone, radiating into his jaw. Harry doesn’t seem to have noticed, thank god. Well not god. Some benevolent road spirit of Rural Route 987b/c. 

“I know you’re just being an ass, as is indelibly writ to your nature by the road spirit of Rural Route 987, letter unknown,” Louis says-- _what the fuck,_ he hears Harry mutter, and plows on apace--“But did Liam really say he could requisition a helicopter?” 

Harry gives him a look. Deserved. 

“ _I_ may not know what it’s like to have the whole world part at my feet, but the division’s not going to spring for a helicopter just to get you back to a desktop wired internet connection and far too many cortados in a row from Mike’s. Not even for their favorite mindmapper,” Harry says. “We can work the case here. You'll live for at least a night and a day. You’re just going to have to bear the indignity.” 

_Mindmapper_ is, all things considered, a very mild thing to call a telempath, a hell of a lot better than some of the words he could’ve used, and that all the agents did use, even if mostly behind Louis’ back, mostly because they are afraid. For instance, _pet._

“I’m sure as fuck not going to find Lanie Price with instant coffee,” Louis says. “You know how distracting it is to drink instant coffee? Grains of mashed coffee powder congealing and the unmistakable aftertaste of burnt oil. It’ll be all I can think about. Even if I weren’t stranded in the middle of a frigid snowpocalypse with the worst person in the world.” 

“Worse than the person who took Alanna Price?” Harry shoots. 

Louis will live...but at what cost. He sighs, and in the tiny cabin it's a louder exhale of air than he means. 

“Interesting how _annoyance_ trumps that superiority complex of morality you cling so hard to,” Harry drawls.  

“Someone needs to bring morality to the division,” Louis says. 

“You know how I know how little you care? You can’t even remember her name,” Harry says.  

The ceiling might be older than the eighties. It was probably plastered over in a later decade. Louis is losing his eye for fine details at the end of an incredibly long day, the end of an incredibly long week. It’s making him anxious, the details of the world swirling around in his periphery. He thinks about the Rural Route again, for clarity’s sake. He’d read a transcript of the inter-township drama on the plane, while Harry had been asleep across the aisle. Soothing petty faxes and memos, pulled onto his inverted laptop display with the magic of the division’s all-access, all-clearance, all-backdoor record sniffing algorithms. 

Details, it’s always in the details. All those irrational tiny decisions that mount up to the big ones. He needs sleep. He’s needed sleep for a while.   

“God parted the Red _Sea,_ not the world,” Louis says. 

“Spare me,” Harry says. He rolls onto his back and closes his eyes. 

They’d been halfway to the regional airport when the rental car had started making a clunking noise that turned out to be not just in Louis’ head and not the result of spending too many hours with Harry. An inspection of the engine in the dark had yielded the same number of answers as this entire trip had done for the case. Zero. 

“It's a half mile walk to town,” Harry says, abruptly sitting up and brandishing the paper map pointing out the local landmarks. To wit, one street with three bars and a grocery mart and a gas station, the last of which was closed in the storm. 

“You will freeze,” Louis exclaims. It’s eleven o’clock at night, and the view out the window is nothing but fat, thickly wet snowflakes. 

“I'd rather not starve. And it’s not like you to care if I froze,” Harry snaps back. 

“I'd rather not starve,” Louis says. That does, as sometimes happens, get a sudden and surprising grin from Harry. Rueful, but wide and attractive as ever. 

Harry has brought a black leather coat with a cut too sleek to be warm. He doesn't even zip it closed before he leaves. 

“Her friends call her Lanie,” Louis says to the empty room. 

It’s a footnote detail in the file folder, three down from the top where Harry’s bodyheat is probably still lingering. Interviews with all of her friends, earnest college kids for whom Christmas might forever hold a shadow. 

 

 

***

 

Boundary cases aren’t nearly as rare as telempaths, and yet Harry Styles had been a big event when he’d joined the division. There had been a ripple of relief that Louis had felt halfway down the block, coming back to work with a vaguely soggy breakfast sandwich to a tide of _someone else gets the freak thank god_. 

It was at least a bit flattering. 

At the time Louis wondered, privately, what brought Harry to it. Louis himself had drifted inevitably to the division, like a nail to a magnet. But Harry stood out from the moment he walked through the drab federal lobby with its card readers and scanners and metal detectors. A tall figure who was always moving and lounging and _looking_ , incongruous next to all the hunch-shouldered analysts and, well. People like Louis. Sure, some of the field agents were charming like the spook stereotype. But most of them were just hard-headed people who’d spent a lot of formative years in military training and were now spending middle-aged years working division cases and then at home with family trying to forget about it. 

Nobody was like Harry, from what Louis could tell, and Louis could _always tell_ when it came to people. Harry was fantastically charismatic and at the same time, ridiculous; where Louis was controlled, Harry was reckless. Louis couldn't do small talk at the best of times and did most of his work despite the people. Harry liked everything about the people, knew everybody's name, took it like a challenge when somebody didn't make eye contact. Harry touched things that didn’t belong to him, in the field, in the office, in life. 

They’d clashed immediately, and about everything. 

Louis was pretty sure Harry had slept with half the floor by three weeks into the job, around the same time that Louis decided, forty-three pages into a report on a murder they’d only just managed to prevent, that Harry was _awful._ Inexorably linked to the realization that Harry was indispensable. 

The division didn’t usually have to deal with murder. Their stricture was to prevent it, as far as they were able, in partnership with all the federal agencies and some of the international ones. And Louis was their golden goose, a rare powerful telempath neither in an institution nor on the payroll of a dictator, and damn good at what he did. 

Telempaths can read emotion, which is more useful for crime solving than the analysts liked to admit. Louis specializes in cases that aren't quite cases yet, preventing things that were only just taking shape in people’s minds and finding the lost before they get too far. He can sink into the emotional residue of a suspect from miles away, from pieces of pre-evidence and witness tapes, pull the line like a wire and circle into motives and plans in a way that seems more than human. 

Or less than human, depending on who you talk to. 

But telempaths need a boundary case, and Harry is the best Louis has ever met. Harry can muffle an emotional projection from across the room, can dampen an entire crowd, like a silencer on the barrel of a gun. He is always useful and sometimes he is _necessary,_ although Louis tries his hardest to prevent Harry from ever seeing that.  

They solved five live cases and two cold ones in the first month alone and Harry took a permanent position in the office block. 

 

***

 

Louis takes advantage of Harry’s absence to change into two layers of sweatpants and hiking socks, wash his face, and put on a pair of thick glasses that make him look only a little bit like a complete dweeb. 

He reads the files again.  

Lanie Price is nineteen years old. She’s got first-rate grades and third-rate parents, a mom with a soon-to-be stepdad three states away from where Lanie Price goes to school and a dad-in-name-only who sells unexciting drugs to fund whatever unexciting things dads like that do. He hasn't been in her life since childhood. The mom seems only average levels of neurotic, not homicidal.

She’s vanished. She went to a friend’s for Thanksgiving, and never came back. It escalated, through the cops and the feds to the division, because there aren’t any easy leads and the routes of explanation started closing until the only ones left were in shadow. Gristle and spit, Louis’ domain. 

Louis had stood in the middle of her campus and felt the brilliant cut of her even covered in the residue of a hundred freshmen. She was a week gone but still running through the quad like a red ribbon—tension too big for paper deadlines and internships. Lanie Price was—no, _is_ a math major and a visual arts minor. She has a boyfriend (default suspect, in custody, although he's gonna get released soon) who’s a wreck. Her dorm room is full of hoodies and her roommate is on a slow unnoticed slide into a mental health crisis (not in custody, clear alibi). Louis had stood in the middle of it, trying not to touch anything.  

It shouldn’t be this hard. It usually isn’t, but there’s something _wrong_ with this one. He hooked into Lanie Price’s mind immediately despite the feeling of distance. She’s out there, but it’s unclear whether it’s on her own volition or someone else’s. He’s got a connection on her psychic trace hooked deep in his brain like a fishing line and he can’t untangle it.

Louis had gotten dizzy halfway through the walk back to the car, and found himself on the ground with Harry buzzing irritation in text in his pocket. 

_Where are you?_

_Terrorizing kids?_

_Seriously Louis if you don’t check in, I’m sicking Liam on you_

_It’s siccing, you imbecile,_ he’d written back. An hour late from when he was supposed to be back at the car. 

So it’s not like things are any _warmer_ between them at this particular moment, which is obviously the moment that they get stranded in the tiny detached cabin that services this part of the road with a rentable bed. Louis normally wouldn’t be out here in the field alone with Harry, except that it’s Christmas and he was loathe to do it to anybody he doesn’t loathe so...Harry it was. 

There’s a kitchen tucked directly into a corner, a worn couch, a tv, a tiny bedroom that only fits a single big bed and a wooden floor that’s unexpectedly high quality. Louis can feel it when he moves, the rich grain and the soft polish. And of course, the mashing sensations in Louis’ head.

Outside the windows is a giant snowstorm causing the closure of all regional airports, and inside are gradual but increasing gaps in the internet. That’s all Louis needs: a day and a night stranded and not even Netflix to distract Harry with. 

It’s his fault that they’re stuck out here. Of course it is. You don’t work a case as a mindmapper without everything being your fault. You accept that. You accept looking like a fool when you can’t prove why you _feel_ that something’s important, because it’s the psychic echo of something that Lanie Price thought, maybe ten minutes ago. Maybe ten years ago. 

You stay up forty-eight hours in a row in the division headquarters until you feel it rotting in the back of your molars, like a bad taste you can’t flush out. You have to get to Canyon Falls, you keep seeing that road sign in your head. You force your boundary partner to book a last minute plane ticket because there is _something here,_ the rural town where Lanie Price had been born and spent eleven mundane childhood years before her mother emigrated them to the big city. But there's something between the desolate prairie and all the farms. You shouldn’t even be able to still feel her here. 

You ignore the fact that you’re a week past that visit to the college campus, that you should’ve lost the trace as soon as you lost physical contact with her recent environs, and you haven’t. She’s still in your head, Lanie Price, a stranger begging for somebody to listen. 

 

***

 

“The guy at the grocery mart is getting divorced,” Louis announces when Harry walks back through the door. 

“You know I hate it when you do that,” Harry says. 

“Well he’s very sad,” Louis says. 

Harry sets down three bags of groceries, wet, and shakes off his leather coat in Louis’ direction. Louis flinches and then curls the side of his upper lip, which is a familiar gesture between them. Harry rolls his eyes.  

“Sad doesn’t mean divorced, it rather suggests the presence than the absence of feeling,” Harry says. 

“He’s very sad that he has to stay to keep the shop open when he’d rather be cheating on his wife,” Louis says. 

Harry makes a horrible grimace. His face is much less attractive that way and Louis enjoys it.  

“You could’ve just offered to do him a solid, checked up on her. I know this must be horrifically boring for you, with your constant need for _stimulation,_ ” Louis says.

“You may be able to eavesdrop on people’s emotions but that doesn’t make you a fortune teller,” Harry says. “By the way, those glasses make you look like a dweeb.” 

“Is this really what the next forty-eight hours are going to be like? Trading potshots so far beneath my caliber I can feel myself get a backache trying to stoop to your level,” Louis asks, turning the page on an interview with Lanie's favorite professor that provided nothing informative. 

“The storm could break tomorrow,” Harry says. 

“Just judging by the depth of the cheating shopkeep's horny despair,” Louis says.  

She felt _happy_ at school. She was on track to join FBI early recruitment, was the thing, the real reason the division had been asked _pretty please_ to figure out what was going on with this one, and fast. She was brilliant and savvy and had a head for their weird riddles, not like everyone. And while Louis didn’t really understand anyone who chose a career like that when it wasn’t forced on them, it was still another check mark in the “didn’t run away” column. 

He could feel the happiness. Numbers re-arranging themselves in their little dance on her pages. Louis blinked and saw his own reading glasses again and the pages of tight interview print. That was….not a great sign. 

Harry has gotten surprisingly good food. He cooks some kind of stirfry while Louis reads the files all the way through again. 

“You know, you don’t have to writhe there all long suffering on the floor, nothing to prove to anyone back at the office anymore, it’s just me,” Harry says. 

Louis has actually forgotten about the couch, so engrossed in trying to see into the shadows of Lanie’s life. But now he wriggles closer to the floor. 

“Can’t be more than one hedonist sucking all the air out of the room,” he mutters to the schematics of Lanie’s home neighborhood, which he already knows is useless, nothing but suburban emotions about _gardening._

Unexpectedly, Harry comes over with the entire pan of stirfry and two big spoons, and sits himself down cross-legged on the floor, close to Louis’ hip. Even this is a tiny bit of relief. Every inch of space closed between them makes the world more quiet. Louis breathes out carefully. 

“Stop working. No one here to impress,” Harry says. “We’re both exhausted.”  

Louis looks at him. It actually looks true. Harry’s had circles under his eyes for the last week, and even though nothing ever really sours Harry’s looks, he has a wrinkle in his brow and a heavy set to his face, which looks less luminous than normal. 

“I’m fine,” Louis says, turning back to the papers. His elbows hurt where they’re grinding steadily against the hard floor. “You go eat babies or whatever you need to do to preserve your skin and keep lying to the administrative staff about your age. I’m going to keep reviewing.”  

“You may be a sanctimonious robot, but you haven’t eaten since a muffin at the airport and I saw you throw half of that out the window when you thought I wasn't looking,” Harry says, gently. “Come on.” 

“It had emotional residue on it,” Louis grumbles. The ache in the bone of his jaw has eased, though, probably with Harry’s super dampening powers, the accidental and impenetrable privilege of being born a boundary case, unreadable on the telempathic plane and forever protected from it. Harry is an awful person but being next to him is like sinking down into a silent theater, muffled from the world. Louis resists the urge to lean closer. 

Harry scoots closer on the floor, and taps the spoon obnoxiously against the pan. “Get your fresh baby right here. Don’t make me pull boundary partner privileges on you. I’ll text Liam and he’ll grant me medical authority faster than you can say ‘I’m concerned about the wellbeing of my mindmapper.’” 

Louis lets his face fall flat into the files. “Go fuck yourself,” he snarls. 

“Oh, I _would_ , but it’s such a small cabin,” Harry says, grinning with all of his teeth. 

 

***

 

Louis is brushing his teeth when Lanie Price rings him on the telempath special, collect call into your damp amygdala. It’s so heavy that he gags on the toothbrush and grabs for the sink. It’s just a wash of staticky emotion at first, a pounding that he has to find some end of to pull. He gropes back to her college—how very strongly she’d felt about math, Louis could not relate, nobody _loved math_ like that—but if you catch one strong emotion you can link it like feeling your blind way down a terrible chainlink fence, one wire to the next, along the roads that make up a mind. 

Lanie is determined. Resolute. A plan. Anticipation. Getting anxious on the edges but refusing to look at it. There’s an edge, something dangerous. It felt like…two weeks old? Fresh. Fresh babies. 

Lanie Price is nineteen, which is basically a baby. She wants to do something, and that’s why she’s gone. So it’s a decision she made that's led to her disappearance. A bad decision, as babies tend toward.

Louis comes to, to Harry in the doorframe of the bathroom and water rushing in his ears. It’s the sink, pouring out water with his toothbrush at the bottom, dancing by the drain under the water pressure. Louis grabs for the handle and turns it shut. 

Harry’s staring at him with enormous, accusing eyes. 

“So I thought to myself, nobody, not even Louis, takes fifteen minutes to brush their teeth.” 

Louis says nothing. The hook suppresses verbal functioning, too much amygdala and too little oxygen, probably. He's reaching for the surface but he can't find it. 

“You’re hooked in to her,” Harry hisses, “You’re hooked in to that girl. You’re still feeling her emotions. How? Since the campus? And you didn’t tell me? No, screw that, I’m not asking. I’m your goddamn superior officer. You didn’t tell me.” 

Louis looks at his own face in the mirror. It’s drawn and pale. He can feel the stir-fry making a valiant attempt to crawl back up his esophagus. It’s a bad time. But he's snapped back enough for words.  

“Superiority complex, I thought I heard that used as an accusation earlier, but it couldn’t possibly have been,” Louis says. “Because only somebody with a superiority complex would lean on that bit of bureaucratic bigotry, that you boundary cases are always given the last minute emergency powers over us. You know that’s only in the field, right?” 

Harry is genuinely angry. Louis can tell because he’s leaning forward and moving fast, using that honed muscle that’s usually disguised under jackets. But Harry’s in a thin t-shirt and boxers now, changed sometime when Louis wasn’t looking. Not that Louis looks. Harry is, despite all of his recklessness and tactile flirtation with the rest of the world, usually very cautious with Louis. He never uses his height like he’s doing now, crowding Louis back up against the sink. It’s interestingly scary.

Louis can’t think further on it, because the surface tension over his mind breaks again and he’s going under and Lanie Price feels like-- _she knows something and that she is the only one who can—_

“You should have told me!” Harry snarls, his voice cutting into Louis’ haze. “You should have told me! We’re out here in the goddamn middle of nowhere on a field mission and you could start cracking _—_ ” 

“Technically, it’s off hours, technically, it’s not the field,” Louis says. 

“And you don’t give a shit about technicality. _”_ Harry says. He’s still too loud, still so angry that his face is flushing red. “Only when it suits you. I know you think that you’re above all the rest of us, almighty mindreader with all your rules, telling other people what they’re thinking. But this, Louis? This fucking matters. You can’t bullshit me. I can’t work if you never give me anything to work with.” 

His voice is coming, Louis realizes, from extremely far away. It’s Lanie in his head, Lanie marching across that tiny liberal arts campus with a secret hugged tight to her chest. He can taste the coconut lip oil that she likes to use. He can feel his mind trying to conform to the shape of hers. 

“Technically, I’ve already _started,”_ Louis says, muddled. “And you don’t know me at all.” 

He’s down on the floor. No, down on the ground of a college campus, and he can’t see anything at all. He hears rushing, rushing emotions. They’re all so linked, it’s always terrified him how linked they all are. 

“All right,” Harry says. It sounds soft, and very close, and Louis’ eyes clear enough to look up at him. 

Harry’s hands are shoved up underneath Louis’ shirt. They’ve moved without Louis noticing it, which tends to happen when all his available attention space is screaming, bleeding across the borders of a ghostly empath landscape, like a cut opening under pressure. He’s down on the ground. He’s pushed up against the small wooden cabinet of the bathroom with his back to it, crumpled to the tiles with his legs folded underneath him. The cabinet is hard behind him. 

Harry’s leaning heavily into him, their bodies pressing together. He’s warm, dense, almost hot. Louis’ shoulders are tight halfway up to his ears, his legs are slipping.  

The empath landscape has dulled to a muted roar. Lanie Price hangs up. 

Louis sighs into Harry’s touch. It is always both the worst and the best part of his day.

“Are you back with me?” Harry says, measured and quiet. 

Louis closes his eyes, to better bear the humility of comfort, to better feel the pull of Harry’s small movements against his skin. People act like what Louis can do is magic, but the irritating thing is that Harry is really the magic, to Louis. He’s never met a boundary partner who can turn it all off, this much, this completely. “You tell me,” Louis says, “You’re the superior officer, the boundary partner. I'm just your mindmapper.” 

Harry sighs, so long and slow that it’s like a decision. His hands don’t move from Louis’ side. They’re steady, wrapping the lowest rib and the dip of his back to his side.  

They sit for seconds or minutes or an hour or something. Probably five minutes, because Louis doesn’t feel any bruises. Louis focuses on pulling his mind back together. Just a blip, that’s all. Just a blip in the stress and the snowstorm, it could happen to anyone. 

“She's in your head,” Harry says. Not a question. They both know what that means and how dangerous it is. A telempath with Louis’ strength shouldn't be having uncontrolled connections across an impossibly long distance. It was textbook pre-cracking.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Harry asks. 

Louis makes a face. “I didn't notice mid the horror of Canyon Falls and this murder cabin. So desperately afraid they're going to glom onto me and draft me to put on a prog horror production of Oklahoma. Rural towns are always desperate for new talent. Gothic Americana is so last year.” 

“You should know you have a tell,” Harry says. 

“It’s a breach of five different international human rights ethics agreements to manipulate me right now,” Louis says. 

“The thing is that when you lie to distract people, you talk all jabbery and flowery and very smart,” Harry says, conversationally. 

“ _Talk all jabbery,”_ Louis mutters. He will come back to this when he's back in his head, not floating between the live wires of emotional contagion. Harry crooks his fingers just enough to dig his fingertips into Louis’ side. Always gentle, condescendingly gentle, Louis thinks. He’d rather Harry scrape with fingernails. Louis can't form a coherent comeback at all. 

“Jabberwocky. Swords. Drink me. If I'm through the looking glass and always messing up what does that make you, the white rabbit? Rather be always changing size than you, running late.”  

“Uh huh,” Harry says, ignoring him, driving him insane. But it's an insane that takes place in this tiny room and not dispersed in other people’s feelings out across the entire globe, pulling Louis too far until he cracks. This irritation is surprisingly good at grounding him back to the moment. Louis vaguely thinks that the worst part is that Harry probably knows this, and is doing it on purpose.

“Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it. But it’s when you’re actually telling the truth that you say something that's so simple it hurts,” Harry says. “It's extraordinary.” 

Louis frowns. 

“You’re right, I don’t know you at all,” Harry says thoughtfully. “And you know, I’m starting to think I should change that.” 

Louis has no idea where this conversation is going and feels a bit dizzy, still. He frowns deeper, increasingly concerned at the look in Harry’s eye. 

“It wasn’t a _challenge,_ Styles, shut up,” Louis says. For fuck’s sake. Bad enough to be losing all dignity on top of a red bathmat that says _Clean Yo’self_ in the wilderness trying to solve a case that is getting colder by the minute. He cannot deal with Harry getting _ideas_ in the middle of it. 

Harry’s fingers twitch. Louis looks at the towels on the back of the bathroom door. 

“Yeah see, you say that, and it’s not at all the same as the way that you sound when you say things that are true,” Harry says. 

“If this is your way of punishing me for not telling you about the whole ‘I’ve stayed hooked into the lost girl even though we’re not supposed to do that’ thing, you should know that I already feel like I’m going to barf up all of dinner and that muffin on you,” Louis says. “I'll solve the case, productions of Oklahoma notwithstanding, just leave me alone to do it.” 

“I just think that I’ve had a major epiphany about how this could be an interesting opportunity to get to know you better,” Harry says. 

“This is boring, stop,” Louis says. “Feel free to go back to yelling at me. You can even record it for Liam.”  

Harry hums. He pulls his hands back and they get up, Louis unreasonably shaky, Harry unreasonably thoughtful. Louis looks hard at the floor and the cabinet and the bathtub with a long scratch down the side, and Harry doesn’t move far back enough. 

“I’ll track down Lanie Price. I’m the best telempath the division’s ever found. I know you can’t possibly appreciate this, but I’m good at what I do. I always solve the case.” Louis says, rather desperate to bring this conversation back to the proper track and cover the mess of his unmeant vulnerability with some certainty.

“Funny how you say _the white rabbit_ and not _my white rabbit,”_ Harry says.  

“What?” Louis asks flatly. 

“Funny how you don’t like to use the possessive,” Harry says. “You don’t say ‘m _y_ case.’ My coffee. My position as the acting authority on all matter of emotions for the division while pretending not to experience them, even though one might think that you would use _that_ possessive, being such a know-it-all.” 

“I hate to break it to you but you’re not making any sense at all,” Louis says, “Is this some Whorfian tripe you're trying to shove on me because you should know that theory is really disputed—”  

“I’m not going to let you crack. We’ll figure out where she is. I’ll keep you safe, that’s what _I_ do,” Harry says. 

Louis sighs. “Fascinating as your limitless, physics-defying infinity of arrogance is,”  

“And you know, especially, you never say _my boundary partner,_ ” Harry says. “And yet. _Your_ mindmapper.” 

The division tries very hard to prevent murders. But surely Louis has prevented enough of them to have earned the _one._

 

***

 

Harry is clearly going to be all manner of difficulty. He hustles Louis into eating a second portion of stirfry, watches him the entire time he re-brushes his teeth, and then insists that they are going to share the bed. 

“I am fine,” Louis says, gritting his teeth. 

“You are hooked into a missing person’s long depth emotional memories across more than five hundred miles. That’s excessive, even for you. I get to be the person who defines fine in this cabin,” Harry said. “And fine includes closer contact with your boundary case.” 

“Plus,” he adds, “The couch is awful for my back, and you get cold.” 

Louis glares at the ceiling. There’s a low wooden beam across the room that other people might find charming. There’s a weird cross-stitch framed on the wall. The bed is a queen-size plush mattress with a fluffy comforter and it does, honestly, look very comforting.  

“She disappeared because she’s doing something, not coerced, not random, a decision,” Louis says. “And she kept thinking about Canyon Falls, if she’s not here.” 

Harry nods, acknowledging the information. For all the criticisms that Louis could make, Harry’s never not listened to the signals that Louis gets, never not taken them seriously. 

“There wasn’t a sign of her in town, no records leading her here, so best bet’s you’re feeling a psychic ghost.” 

“I know that,” Louis interrupts. Harry’s mouth twitches but he only finishes setting up their phones to charge and fusses with the thermostat. It’s warmed up, and Harry pulls his shirt off. 

“My eyes,” Louis says, into the pillow. 

“Cost of finally telling _your superior officer_ that you’re having an uncontrolled mind meld,” Harry says, unruffled. “I say we keep to the cabin, try to follow your emotional clues, find her as quick as possible. There must be a reason you’re still hooked into her feelings, even over the distance, and I don’t think it’s whatever’s in Canyon Falls present day. And the snow’s got us trapped here, besides which you’re not a field agent.”  

“I’m a go-wherever-I-like agent, no rules for telempaths,” Louis mutters.

“Over my dead body you will,” Harry says smugly. Protective Harry is awful. Louis ignores the way it makes him swallow hard. 

Harry’s skin is warm, only there for the increased efficacy of his boundary powers, Louis knows, but still. Separate from all the madness of the case and the active sparring match between the two of them, on some visceral level it still feels like getting into bed with a man. Louis burrows deeper into the comforter and turns on his side.

His mind is notably quieter. It’s past midnight, and he’s falling into the mattress without really being able to control it. 

“And yet so many rules, even if you think you hide them,” Harry says, as if to himself, finding his way to some complicated arrangement of blankets the other side of the bed. But of course Louis can hear him because they’re _six inches apart._

Fuck that. Louis does a _great_ job hiding things. It’s the rest of the world that can’t manage. 

 

***

 

 

Louis wakes up with no one in his head. He’s slept so soundly that his shoulder muscles are pleasantly sore. He’s still deep in the comforter and he’s kicked off one sock in the middle of the night. The cabin is chilly, since the heating kicked off, and there’s a wind outside. What he can see from the sliver of window is just frost and white. 

Harry’s draped all around him, chest up to Louis’ back, arm flung securely around his shoulders, snoring in his ear. Louis sighs. Obviously Harry would be a loud sleeper, a loud everything. It’s ironic that he’s a boundary case. The situation is ridiculous. Harry’s arms are warm and larger than they need to be, surely. 

On the other hand Harry falls entirely out of the bed when Louis pushes him off and comes up looking like an indignant owl, hair everywhere. Small comforts. 

“I’m going over the files about Lanie’s hometown,” Louis announces, perched on a stool in the kitchen as Harry cracks a million eggs into a pan. “How did you get those back through the storm without breaking them? You’re as clumsy as an ox.” 

Harry stifles a yawn with a middle finger. “Clumsy as an _ox,_ is that a thing? I bought a Mars bar and ate while marching back here. It has been the only thing powering me through.” 

“Even your candy tastes are unexalted. I shall remember that for your late afternoon crankytime back at headquarters,” Louis says. 

Harry had begun to put the middle finger away, but he sticks it back up at that. “Sorry, forgot you hate every indulgence of every kind.” 

“‘Don’t muzzle an ox when it’s out treading grain,’” Louis quotes absently.

He’s distracted, a wisp of Lanie Price running underneath his palms. Louis breathes. Feelings of frustration, cold wooden pews and then, contrasting, hot summer days with long dresses. She was raised Evangelical, which is in the files and he isn’t surprised that it hooks into his brain, given everything, but it’s different to smell the plastic bindings on the Bible covers. Smells like obligation.

This is the difficulty of letting some stranger put sticky fingers into your head. 

“I’m never cranky, I’m charming,” Harry announces. Louis jerks on the stool, comes back to the present moment of the cold kitchen. Harry is looking at him with sharp eyes.  

“Should you be doing that?” Harry asks, stirring eggs. 

It’s a good question. Louis kicks at the rungs of the stool. Outside, the wind is already howling. It’s morning but it might as well be night, and it makes the tiny cabin feel like it’s suspended out of time. Louis has changed into the kind of clothes he always wears to the office, dark pants and a dark grey sweater, but Harry is in pajama pants and an unbuttoned shirt like he’s on vacation. 

“She’s still missing, isn’t she?”  

Harry doesn’t say anything to that. 

There’s an unofficial ticker back in the break room. The division may have its fair share of gallows humor and distasteful late nights, but they would never be so unprofessional as to have an official one. Nonetheless, one time it was a kid. A kid who still wore backpacks and light-up sneakers. Everything had started to get hung up on logistical madness across state lines and different departmental authorities, and Liam, who never yelled, had marched into the breakroom and started yelling. He’d drawn a thick black line with tick marks on the spotty whiteboard and pointed at it, finger shaking. The message was clear: every night that passes in a missing persons case is a failure. You break the rules now and count the cost later, to keep that ticker from moving.

“I don't want you to put yourself at risk, keeping up this connection,” Harry says, at last. 

Louis snorts, pushing his glasses back up his nose as he rifles through pages. “Well that’s idiotic. My entire life is a risk. Being a telempath and awake is a risk,” he says.  

Louis looks up to find Harry shoving something in his face. A bowl of eggs and... potato? Bell peppers? Were there onions in there? Did people even eat onions in the morning? 

“Stop trying to poison me.” 

Harry rolls his eyes again. “Like the division could afford to lose you. I'd get fined.” 

Louis considers. “Maybe they’ve taken out insurance against me. It would be the smart thing.”  

“I didn't know you thought of it that way,” Harry says. 

“What, insuring against my own death?” Louis laughs, “I’ve maxed out my life insurance for my mom. Gotta be a pragmatist in this business. And you know, if you had two brain cells to rub together you would’ve already looked up all my personnel decisions. Or don’t they give all-access clearance to boundaries?” 

“No, about being awake, that merely being awake a risk,” Harry says. “Is that how it feels?” 

Louis shoves a stack of folders toward Harry. “There could be something in the FBI recruitment stuff,” he says, “We should start over again there.” 

 

***

 

The very first case Louis worked was in the middle of his sophomore year of college. The campus police station was a tiny place, four rooms if you counted the closet, and staffed by a single student worker who hadn’t known any better than to let the pale-faced kid with the tight mouth come barreling through. 

It was the biggest event of the year on their rural campus: a post-party drunken brawl turned uglier than anybody had actually wanted it to. No fatalities but one nasty concussion, two viciously broken ribs and a jagged glass wound. Somebody was getting suspended, if not kicked out. And Louis knew that same as everyone, had overheard the story by breakfast in the cafeteria, but he also knew that the senior who’d brushed into him between the dining hall and the history building was lying. About how it happened, and who’d done it. 

Telempathy is a messy system subject to pressure. Louis tried to describe it to a skeptical campus cop who’d never even met a telempath, until he lost all patience, grabbed the cop’s mug off the desk, and told him everything he felt about his parents. They called the senior in and had Louis hold his hand, which was, at that point in his untrained life, an extremely bad idea. 

When you’re a ferociously overpowered telempath with no real training you can make a hook, but you can’t unhook it. Not when the emotional target is a whirling chasm of grief and regret and hangover and petty uneasy blackmailing over an alumni scholarship. Not when the emotional target lives two buildings over and walks the same campus as you, has been there for four years, will be there tomorrow, is in the same building as you the whole day. 

Louis lasted five hours, propped up in lecture halls and sinking, slowly but surely, until he passed out in a bathroom. 

One adrenaline shot later, the school nurse handed Louis over to one of the two school counselors. This particular one was fifty-something, tired of his job, and thinking, before Louis walked in the door, mainly about his two golden retrievers and whether his husband would forgive him if he got a third. 

Louis sat in a cheap scratchy fabric chair and held his hands between his knees so as not touch anything. The counselor, to his credit, didn’t lie. He didn't pretend it was easy or that he had answers or that it was _normal._ He poured two cups of coffee and got some pamphlets down and pulled his chair out from behind the desk. 

He didn’t say much that Louis hadn’t already heard or couldn’t have looked up, but it was still different, somehow, to hear it from somebody else. That telempathy could have a rare secondary surge in late adolescence. That there was a registry, a protected class designation, that the government takes interest. That Louis was going to be on the list somewhere, for good or ill, looking down a lifetime of unique opportunities if he wanted them. 

But all that was for the future. For now, the counselor emphasized, the one important thing that everybody remembered from the basic telempath seminars in counseling programs was this: uncontrolled emotional connection could lead to a catastrophic breakdown, permanent loss of mental function, maybe even death. And they called it _cracking._ The first immovable doctrine of telempathy was control. The second was distance. 

Louis took the pamphlets, made a standing appointment that he already knew was going to be mostly talking about golden retrievers (he’d hit the side of the desk on the way in, plus there was dog hair all over the chair), and went home for a mandatory two week leave. 

He came back with a new major in criminal psychology, and a suitcase full of long-sleeved shirts. 

 

***

 

Louis picks out all the bell peppers, and gets distracted by interviews with Lanie’s mother, and eats half of them before he realizes that Harry’s putting them back in the bowl. 

“Really. Must you,” Louis says. 

Harry just grins at him over the kitchen island. He’s going through Lanie’s FBI recruitment package, and he’s got his laptop open as it valiantly tries to chug through three proxy connections to access the databanks they don’t have on their local machines. The rural countryside sucks _._

“She’s only been in the early access program for three months,” Harry notes. “Great scores, yadda yadda. She’s got a good psych eval. No jealousy or weird fights among the potential recruits--” 

Louis snorts again, and Harry glances up. FBI and the division share a pipeline. Louis’ path hadn’t exactly been ordinary but, he still remembers those days. Too many sweaty high achievers with delusions of grandeur about justice and their authority to dispense it.  

“Well let’s say, no more in-fighting than normal,” Harry says. 

“Would you know normal if it punched you in the face? Who has a good psych eval and wants to go join the federal bullshit institution, that’s suspicious.” 

“Normal isn’t usually the one punching me in the face. Is normal the one that punched you in the face?” Harry’s grinning again. The grins are picking up in frequency. Louis looks at Harry’s mouth for a second before he shakes his head and bends over the folders again. 

“Everyone punched me in the face,” Louis says. 

Harry comes around to his side of the island. Louis isn’t expecting it. He jolts when it looks up, startled to find Harry there, shirt still unbuttoned and hair still messy. He smells faintly of bell peppers, but more like himself. Louis is surprised that it's familiar, salt and spice and something warm.  

“Stop it,” Louis says, “I went through the division bootcamp same as everybody, I may not be all field agent full of it but I can still shank you with the utensils if I have to.”  

“I’m sure you’re just deadly with a spoon,” Harry says. He puts a finger out, just far enough to tap the side of Louis’ wrist. Harry can do it from a distance but it’s always better with skin to skin contact.  

It’s like the volume turning up and then down on a stereo system, Harry’s psychic boundary merging with his own telempathic field and melting it away. It feels like being normal for an instant.  

“You keep trying to hook into her, and I'm gonna keep stopping you.” 

“It's the case,” Louis says. 

“It's my _job,”_ Harry says. “Go back to the files. Do the grunt work. Not everything is solved by being a lone prodigy.” 

Louis goes back to the files. There’s nothing fucking there _._

 

***

 

“Did you know Bakeoff has a holiday special?” Harry says, flipping through a menu on the TV. It’s been an hour and a half, Louis has gone through the files twice, the wind has broken something off from the front porch of the cabin, and Harry still hasn’t buttoned up his shirt. 

“I don't know what any of those words mean,” Louis says. 

Harry swivels on the couch. “You've never seen _Bakeoff?”_

Louis glances at the screen. An aggressively warm-temperature macro reel of flour and sugar is playing to a kitschy soundtrack. Louis winces.   

“I don't do reality TV,” Louis says. “Do you mind? One of us still has enough neurons to concentrate, and I would truly like to get home somehow.” 

He’s doodling over the names of Lanie’s FBI classmates. There’s something bothering the edge of the pull. It’s recent, it has to do with whatever Lanie was working on. He can nearly feel it except that Harry’s blocking it with his bright and horrible presence.  

“Oh, certainly, I get it,” Harry says, clicking the volume higher. He’s outright sprawling on the couch, knees wide, one hand wrapped casually around the edge of a pillow, and the other arm spread out on the back of the couch. No one needs to take up space like this, so _much_ and so domineering, like it’s just his default. Louis has a sudden sense memory of the night before, the feeling of having Harry spread out in bed at his back, warm and dark and _close._

The untempered voices of reality TV fill the room. Louis can’t actually read emotions over most technology but he still gets a full blast of _sincerity._ Harry, he realizes with horror, is _humming the theme song._

Louis counts to fifteen, as a measure against homicide. The contestants start frittering with bowls. They're very anxious considering their only task seems to be sticking shit in colorful fridges and then taking it out again. 

“Look, look. I can feel that there’s something I’m missing in these files, I can feel it because she’s feeling it, and if you don’t let me tap back into Lanie Price, we could lose it. I don’t know how long this connection’s gonna last.” 

Harry keeps staring at the tv. Louis has worked enough cases with him to know that when Harry is truly upset over something, he doesn’t show it as much as you think he will. The line of his profile and sharp jaw look more rigid than normal. 

“How many times do I have to tell you, there’s nothing to prove right now,” Harry says at last. “It’s very impressive, your mental connection. Excellent work, you are the master, etcetera. Somebody’s going to want to write a paper about it when we get back home. Now I’d like you to walk that stick in your ass over to the couch, and watch a cheerful holiday baking show.” 

Louis crosses his arms and sits back on the stool, exasperated. “You’re terrible. You’re not even _listening_.” 

“ _You’re_ terrible,” Harry says productively. 

“We're all terrible people just doing our best to prevent other people from being more terrible,” Louis says.

“You know, I actually think I agree with you, for once,” Harry says. 

“Then _listen.”_  

Harry stills. Louis takes a deep breath. 

“It’s not, in any way, about ego. It’s not about what you think. It’s not about what _I_ think. I have to do this,” he says. “She’s still out there and she's convinced that she's alone. Do you get that? You can hear it, but I can feel it _._ She thinks she's completely alone.” 

It's shit to put it into words and maybe it's useless to try, with a boundary case especially. But he can see realization breaking over Harry's face, even though it’s chased by reluctance. But in their business, understanding makes the decision. 

“She's not alone,” Louis says. He's never been good at the thousands of easy ways that other people seem to leak warmth, or care, or worst of all love. He reads it, wades through it endlessly, understands its current and motion. None of that helps. It's like floating in a sea your whole life without ever knowing the name for _water_. But for her sake, he'll try. It's the one thing worth so much more than protecting himself. “She's not alone. She's got me.” 

Harry's hand is clenched so tight on the pillow that his knuckles have gone white. Louis waits, because even though it's hard to admit, he can't do this without Harry letting him. 

“She's not alone,” Harry says at last. 

 

***

 

They decide that Louis will try it in the bathroom. Harry even deigns to put on a pair of jeans. 

The bathroom is a smart call, Louis realizes. It’s the most insulated part of the cabin, bumped out from the main room in its own thick interior wall structure, to attach to the outdoor lines of plumbing. Plus, the tile and the ceramic of the tub will help keep Louis’ telempathic focus buffered from Harry, should slow the impact of any field influence coming in from the outside. Granted it might also dampen Lanie, but since Louis already has the hook in place, the real challenge is Harry’s disruptive boundary influence. 

He’s surprised that Harry thought of it. Harry’s always been sharp and excellent and skilled in the field--it’s the _division,_ they’re all sharp and excellent and skilled--but it’s not like they sit around and talk shop. 

“Two minutes,” Harry says. 

“I will be sure to check my watch when I’m floating around in somebody’s undifferentiated nonlinear subconscious processes,” Louis says.  

Harry doesn’t roll his eyes. He’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom and fixing Louis with an assessing look. It makes Louis shift from one foot to the other. Even in jeans, and an actually buttoned shirt, Harry’s still a distracting, salient presence. Louis usually only has to deal with this version of Harry’s attention when they’ve got a strike mission in the field hardening like a carapace around all of them. Strike missions are always insane, bottled up moments of unwieldy tension, Louis can blame all the feelings in his stomach on _that._

“Think about her FBI connection, see what she feels, get in and out. Really it should only take you thirty seconds. I’ve seen how fast you work. A second over two minutes, and I’m breaking this door down.” 

“You have an agenda to make this sharing space thing a living hell,” Louis says. “It’s amazing that you’re this overprotective with people you don’t even like. I can’t imagine what it’s like with people you _do.”_

Harry puts his hand out, fast and smooth like the operative training he has but rarely shows. He puts it on Louis’ cheek, warm palm, careful strong fingers splaying around Louis’ ear and the bend of his jaw. The whole world goes quiet, quiet, quiet. 

“That’s not going to make it go any faster,” Louis says, breathlessly. He can hear his own heartbeat, and just that.

“Be careful,” Harry says. “Not with her. With you.” 

“Ok,” Louis says. He’s said ok before, to his mom, to all the counselors he’s paid to be concerned so his mom doesn’t feel like she has to, to Liam scores of times before diving into another case. But he’s not sure if he’s ever felt this held to it, like he’s promising something very big indeed under the power of Harry’s endless, bright eyes.  

Harry’s pulling his boundary back. And it’s Lanie again, up against the fence of Louis’ mind like she’s been waiting for it. A screech of _lost_ and uncalculated consequences hits Louis behind the eyeballs. Harry starts to walk back to the far edge of the cabin, where he’s going to wait with the timer on his phone and that wrinkle in his brow. Louis closes the bathroom door. There’s the quality of light dimming on the inside of your head, when you start to slip under. 

“Hey Lou,” Harry calls from outside, utterly incapable of letting something happen without being a total annoyance. “Never said I didn’t like you.” 


	2. Chapter 2

Louis comes up choking. 

“Don’t do that,” Harry says. His hand is on Louis’ back, underneath his shirt and far up his spine, resting over where Louis’ shoulderblade is spasming back in a pull of muscle, tight and frantic. He’s thrashing, and Harry is holding him down. Louis has a pavlovian impulse to keep doing whatever he is doing, but he thinks better of it.  

“Hey,” Harry says, “Hey.” He repeats a series of words in a tone that Louis recognizes as generally meaningless solicitude and therefore does not waste effort parsing. His lungs are tight, unhappy with Louis ignoring them for the intangible and made-up world of psychic emotions. 

Harry rubs his back, which is disturbingly soothing. Typically Louis would only get the quick grab on his wrist or arm, or a quick squeeze to the back of his neck if Harry was feeling particularly domineering and pissed off in the context of a field mission. Typically, he’d have shoved Harry off by now, be shaking off the feeling of Harry’s touch, and looking for a med tech clearance so he could go smoke something.

“ _Erghlmph_ ,” Louis tries. They’re on the couch, and he feels limp. 

“It’s been ten fucking minutes, you absolute jackass! I said two minutes!” Harry sounds exhausted, and relieved. And _mad._

Louis cracks an eye and a smile. He’s pleased enough that he can’t even freak out when he realizes that he’s been pulled onto his side into Harry’s lap, his cheek pressed into Harry’s chest, his legs out along the length of the couch. Harry’s arms are wrapped around him like a blanket, heavy and warm, and one hand is holding Louis’ head, bracing it inward. 

“Ah, back from the war, and you said you would write,” Louis says indistinctly. 

“Do not think I’m not keeping track of every single way in which you’re violating my clear directive,” Harry hisses, but his hold on Louis is immeasurably gentle. “You’re not supposed to go that far under. You’re not supposed to be doing any of this. This was a bad idea.” 

Louis smiles even bigger. It is possibly an oxygen deprivation high, because he also starts giggling to himself. 

Harry sighs. “Stop it,” he says, but not in the tone of someone who expects to be listened to. He pulls at Louis’ ear, restlessly feeling around his head and shoulders like the emotional hook is some kind of debris that Harry can brush away. Louis blinks, startled by the unfamiliar feeling of somebody just _touching him_ without any hesitation and with no resulting cascade of messy secrets and oily needs. It makes him feel very self-conscious of his own body. 

It’s only protocol, physical contact with a boundary case in an unorthodox situation. Louis tells himself this in very lucid terms. He swallows a couple times. 

“You’ve unbuttoned your shirt again, you have a _problem,_ ” Louis says, when his throat works. Harry sighs even more loudly. Louis can feel the rise of Harry’s chest as he does. His shirt sleeve is damp, which is weird. He’s cold and shivering, but Harry’s thrown a blanket over his legs. 

“I’m preparing for my role in Oklahoma,” Harry says. Louis giggles again, helplessly. Harry glares down at him. 

“You fell into the bathtub. Can’t leave you anywhere.” 

Louis sniffs. “The hook was so fucking far away. She’s not here. That’s why….I had to go deep. It took a minute. But I got it, I got the lead.” 

“So what’s the lead?” Harry asks. 

“She got into the FBI database, first thing, a month ago,” Louis says. 

Oh, Lanie and all her numbers. Analyst track, that one. She’d been looking for something, and then she’d found it. Louis had been able to taste it, the furtive discovery and the resolve. It tasted like old emotions, patterns that had swirled in her head and only recently come out of hiding again. 

“She was looking for something, for someone. And then she went to go find them. Nobody took Lanie Price. Lanie Price ran away, and now she’s in trouble.” 

 

***

 

Harry takes the phone call with Liam into the bathroom, which is clearly the mutually-agreed safe space of the cabin. Louis pulls his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms around them, and becomes a ball of indiscriminate non-feeling on the couch. 

Harry has left on the ludicrous cooking show. Louis has little desire to move, so the pointless moving of bowls and discussion of stirring techniques washes over him. There’s something fabulously complicated involving forms of sugar that Louis has never imagined possible. There’s an awful lot of emphasis on making things identical. Louis wonders if they know that they’re fighting a losing battle; he wonders if they know that the world is impossibly idiosyncratic. The world likes to put the same labels on infinitely complicated things, like feelings, like that will help anyone understand them. 

Harry’s low voice is calm through the wall, talking Liam down from whatever crisis Liam is currently having over their misadventures. It must be effective, because the only text that Louis gets is _you better be doing your meditation exercises or so help me._

“This is impossible,” Louis says, when Harry comes back out, quite a bit later and with the marks of sitting cross-legged the bathmat texture on his thighs. Harry’s changed back into boxers for some reason indefensible before god and man. Louis glares at the thighs pointedly for a second. If Harry gets hypothermia, he’d better have goddamn cleared it with Liam. 

Louis gestures at the tv. “They don't even give them the measurements. How is this considered a just contest? It’s a hazing ritual is what it is.”

“That's why it's called a technical challenge,” Harry says. “Move over.” 

Louis obliges, chewing his bottom lip. “It’s a suspiciously uncalibrated metric. And where is the judging scale made explicit? What if one of them simply has better spatial reasoning than the other? When does anyone cook without measurements in real life, is this an accurate measure of ability?”

Harry is sitting way too close. “Oh my god,” he exclaims, “Of _course_ you’re uncomfortable with competition. Yet another thing I had wrong.You’re only competitive with yourself.”

Louis sniffs. He shifts, and moves the pillow, and shifts again, but Harry fails to follow normal human social cues and move further away. “Only because nobody else is anything like a competition.” 

“I’m learning so much today,” Harry says. 

Harry throws an arm around the back of the couch. Not being a teenager on an awkward date in a movie theater, Louis glances back at it, and then at Harry’s intolerable profile. The sad truth is that bloodstains would definitely make them forfeit the deposit on this disgustingly cozy cabin, and then Liam would be angry at him. More angry. Liam is one of the only people in the division who radiates nothing but dogged commitment to Truth, Justice, and the American Way when Louis comes into the room. Louis doesn’t want to lose that small comfort.

“You were right,” Harry says. “It was in the access records. We missed it the first go-round. Lanie took another recruit's badge and went digging in the FBI persons database, a week before Thanksgiving. Most recruits couldn’t have even figured out how to query that database.” 

“She’s not most recruits,” Louis says. Takes one to know one. Harry tilts his head to the side.

“You think it felt like she was looking for someone in particular. Do you know who it is?” If Harry thinks he’s subtly redirecting Louis’ awareness from his encroaching arm, Harry is even stupider than Louis pretends he is. 

“I know she was looking for someone in particular,” Louis says. 

“Liam's on it,” Harry says. “But he already has a pretty good idea of who she might be chasing.” 

“Yeah,” Louis says, going back to staring at the baking, because it deserves his attention and maybe if he just pretends that Harry isn’t being impossible, Harry will _stop_. He can dream. 

Besides, Louis was clearly wrong about baking. There are all kinds of rules and protocols being invoked in this tent, and a pleasing rigor to the judges’ breakdowns of where people went wrong. Louis likes things that are hard, and he likes things that are _rational,_ puzzles that click together into a logical format. Sure, there’s some element of taste at the end of this but even that’s a thing that the judges are distilling into a series of decision points. 

It’s also more tense than he’d expected. Louis finds himself chewing his lip. It seems like timing is important, but the humidity in this preposterous tent also seems to matter. 

“If they vote this very worried old woman off the show,I am suing for emotional distress. Like this show could handle the bad rap that would come from a telempath suing them for emotional distress.” 

“Only you could decide to sue the Bake Off. It doesn’t even work like that in England,” Harry says. 

“It’s distributed on an American service, their distributing subsidiary should be liable. Hand me my laptop, I’ll look it up,” Louis says.

Harry whaps him on the shoulder. It’s light but it still lingers, a sharp snap, the sensation spreading from the impact. Louis shivers, just a little. Harry moves _even_ _closer_.

“Just because you can’t handle competition doesn’t mean no one can,” Harry says. Harry’s arm isn’t exactly on his shoulders but it’s a very near thing. It’s like a radiating buffer, like a heater kicking on next to him and gradually filling his space with annoying observational boundary partners and the jittering feeling of a body close by. 

“What are you talking about, I could compete with anybody with my eyes closed,” Louis says. 

“Would you shut up and just put your head on my shoulder?” Harry says. 

Louis jolts so fast he thinks he might have just given himself whiplash. “Do you really have to keep trying to get a rise out of me,” Louis says flatly. “Can we not give each other like, a half hour break, or is it too much to ask—”

“Christ,” Harry says, under his breath. 

He moves fast, folding Louis in with one arm and effectively smashing him into a fold of impossible long limbs and the warm press of his side. Louis realizes, belatedly, that Harry’s exposed skin has been a calculated threat this whole time. Harry’s telempathic boundary comes over him like the surface water of a pond, muffling everything. The world slides and blurs, its edges softened. Harry’s jaw is so near the side of his face that Louis has no idea whether he can even move his head. 

“Relax,” Harry says. “That hook’s still working your brain, and I don’t want you to go back under. I’m not trying to _bother_ you. I’m trying to _help you._ The smartest thing we can do is stay close. Why are you so _jumpy._ Hasn’t anyone ever taught you how to cuddle?” 

Louis stares at the tv. His shoulder is jammed, curled forward to fit under Harry’s arm, but he can feel the unmistakable wash of Harry’s powers made strong with skin-to-skin contact. Of course. He hadn’t even realized that it had been getting worse, the throbbing sense of an outside emotional connection bringing that familiar headache back. It’s easing away now. 

“In my defense, understanding what the fuck you’re on about is a technical challenge,” Louis says, faintly, from Harry’s side. 

Harry’s deodorant is a familiar smell of pine and salt, something he associates with fleeting moments on late work nights, when you’re high on case-closing adrenaline and then crashed out on the vague exhaustion that comes afterward. It’s new and strange to be pressed up against Harry’s body here, now, in front of a brightly-colored tv program and without any euphoric agents shouting about what heroes they are or, whatever. Louis feels a little dizzy. He can feel muscle knots release in his back, knots he hadn’t even known he’d had, years-old and taken for granted. 

Harry works the tips of his fingers into Louis’ hair. Louis doesn’t mean to, but he sighs. On the screen, the contestants wail about proving. Louis has no idea what they have to prove. Harry’s boundary surrounds him, flowing over him like molasses. Molasses probably has dangerous properties that Louis doesn’t even know about, that would wreck a technical. Harry’s right. Louis has no idea how to tangle his body up with another person, least of all trapped in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere. 

The old woman does not get voted off. Blessed be the road spirit of Rural Route 987. 

“I guess it would feel like missing the measurements if you’ve always just been able to read somebody else’s feelings about cuddling,” Harry says quietly, an episode later, sounding amused. 

“Yes. Imagine knowing what people want before they even do. Bliss and party tricks,” Louis says evenly.  The heater has kicked back on. He’s moved back from the edge of the couch and relaxing into the nearness of Harry. He refuses to rest his head on anybody’s shoulder but he’s half on Harry’s arm, and his knees have tilted over to bump awkwardly into Harry’s thigh, which is something that absolutely nobody gets to comment on, thanks very much. Louis yawns. 

Harry's watching him.  Louis is pretty sure that he knew that Harry’s eyes are green, but sometimes they’re _very green,_ caged in dark eyelashes and hard to look away from under his heavy brows. Harry’s whole face always looks like something that belongs on a magazine instead of in a federal office. He looks good in the rain, in terrible fluorescent lighting, at four in the morning in the division kitchen eating cheap donuts and making fun of everything that Louis says. 

“I've always thought the telempathy would only be useful. Yet another thing I’ve been wrong about?” Harry says.

“I am dreadfully useful, remind me to remind you to tell Liam to give me a pay raise next time he yells at you,” Louis says. 

Harry huffs a small noise of even deeper amusement. “For _dating._ Given how phenomenally awkward you are at even sitting next to me. _”_

_“_ Oh.” Louis yawns, vaguely insulted. There’s wind outside the cabin, and there are gorgeous cakes made from disaster and stress on the tv, and the very worried old woman is still in the running but she’s chosen to make three different showstopper elements when she should’ve just picked one and everything is _ridiculous._ In the absence of his own telempathy Louis can feel the strain of the last few weeks sweeping out from the corners of his mind. It’s so rare to get to release it. It’s making him soft and ludicrous and vulnerable. 

Harry’s still touching his hair, giving it very small and deliberate tugs, like an esoteric Harry experiment with some obscure purpose. It’s still nice. Louis closes his eyes. 

“Well you’re super wrong again, someone should give you a degree, original contributions to the field of wrongness,” Louis says, stalwartly, and grumpily. “Dating is phenomenal. What an invention. Love to go on dates and have to _touch people_ and pretend I don’t feel a million things I am tired of feeling, grimy little ambitions about jobs and stupid obsessions with sports teams and the acid taste of constant whining about commutes, or whatever. I am obviously terrific at giving people good dates, but I currently have lots of other things to do with my gifts. Like saving babies.”

“Right,” Harry says, “ _Giving people good dates,_ that’s a normal human way to describe it. That’s gotta be why you’re not used to the body language of people forcing a little physical closeness on you.” 

“Right, I’m usually the one in charge, you’re insufferable,” Louis says, uncertain what he’s agreeing with but loathe to reveal that he’s lost the thread of this conversation. He’s just so sleepy so suddenly, with the telempathy muted and the ache of controlling it no longer a constant in the back of his skull. 

Harry’s arm is long, so it’s looped all the way around Louis’ side with room to spare. Harry finds Louis’ wrist with his hand, circles it with his fingers, and squeezes it. Louis’ breath catches in his throat, and he stiffens, but Harry just keeps holding his arm down, a certain, implacable pressure, a warm and inexorable insistence. Louis feels himself go a little more pliant. 

“Right,” Harry echoes, and he sounds a little like he’s laughing. 

Louis frowns, on principle. It’s easier to let his thoughts unspool with his eyes closed. “You know. Everybody thinks that about telempathy and dating. That it means we get all the answers. It’s wrong. The thing that regular people don't realize about emotions is that they are, well. That they’re so _similar_. Not just the ones you express. _Mostly_ not the ones you express. And they bleed from one to the other, all the time. Imagine feeling that, everybody’s thousand different impulses, all the things they never tell you. Anger is similar to joy is similar to hate is similar to hope. They come at you all the time when you’re a telempath, from everybody.” 

“Sounds frightening,” Harry says softly. 

“I'm good at it,” Louis snaps.

“That's not what I said,” Harry says. 

Louis snorts, a tight undirected sound in the back of his throat. But the baking show has turned into baking radio, there’s a rhythmic sloughing wind throwing snow on the windows, and everything is peaceful. He can’t muster up the energy to make it convincing.

“And to think I always thought that you disliked me because you couldn’t read me,” Harry says. 

Louis laughs, a laugh that burbles out sounding mildly hysterical. 

“Oh, not at all, I disliked you entirely on your own merits,” he says, making a small whirling motion with his foot.He must be truly loopy now, yawning again. “Would staff the entire division with boundary cases if I could, if there were more of you. If any of you ever wanted to work with any of us.” 

“With telempaths?” Harry asks, neutrally.

“Well I suppose,” Louis says. “With me, really. With telempaths like me.” 

“There aren’t any telempaths like you,” Harry says. “What is it about me that always rattled you so?”

“You’re everywhere, you get into everything,” Louis says. _This_ at least is easy. “You wear the loudest clothes, you flirt with anything that moves, you pretend you don’t know things because you think it’s funny and you say weird shit just to get under people’s skin. You’re nosy. You think too many things are funny. You don’t know the division rulebook and yet you’re pretty confident about breaking half of it when you want to. You’re _rich,_ obviously, because you treat shitty, crappy things like they’re just a tourist attraction that you can enjoy. You enjoy _everything._ You’ve never known what it’s like to not go after the things you want.” 

“I asked what it is that you _don't_ like,” Harry says, wolfish and pleased. Louis jabs him on his bare thigh, but even that feels like some kind of defeat when Harry just laughs. “Anyway you’re rich too.” 

“I’m rich _now,”_ Louis corrects. 

“Really though,” Harry prompts. “Really, why do I bother you?” His arm slides against Louis again, heavy and squeezing him, absurd and yet dizzying. Louis has the sudden desire to be pushed into the corner of the couch and kept there, has the urge to go even looser than he is, burrow his face into Harry’s neck and not take responsibility for anything at all. It is the opposite of _control_ and _distance._

“You're not afraid,” Louis says, after a weighted minute. “You're not afraid of anything. It's a dangerous way to live.”

“You’re not afraid,” Harry says. “I’ve had to hold you back from running into a _literal_ burning building. You broke three state laws and nearly gave Liam a heart attack the last time we let you into the field. You stole cigarettes from _Zayn.”_

Louis is sliding, into sleep, into the weird grasp of whatever all this _Harry_ is doing to him.  He gives a noncommittal shrug. 

“Dangerous for everybody else,” Louis says. “Lanie Price isn’t afraid. That’s why she ran away, she’s trying to do something that she doesn’t think anybody else can do.  She’s a genius and an idiot and she’s smart enough to think she can figure it all out, and those are the worst kinds. She doesn’t trust anybody. I’ve got to find her.” 

“I know,” Harry says. 

Harry readjusts them, pulls a pillow onto his lap and nudges Louis toward it. It’s a better angle at which to watch the uneasy construction of the showstoppers, Louis tells himself as he lets himself be lowered, head in Harry’s lap on a pillow, all his muscles slumping toward total meltdown in a grateful mess. Harry rests both his hands in Louis’ hair and it’s so nice he feels, absurdly, like crying. 

“You want to know why I thought I didn’t like you?” Harry says, very quiet and very gentle. “Because you keep a wall a mile high between you and everybody else. I assumed you thought you were too good for the rest of us. Obsessed with being perfect. But it’s not that at all, is it. A mile high wall between you and everybody, because nobody understands. And you took all that, and just want to protect us.” 

“I’m not too good. I’m never good enough,” Louis says. It’s a truth so obvious that he doesn’t know if he’s ever said it out loud, so obvious he frowns, even half asleep under Harry’s hypnotic pressuring hold.

“You save people. Even when it makes you this damn lonely,” Harry says. His hands are moving, gentle through Louis’ hair, exploratory down the side of his face. Louis is falling easily into a deep kind of unconsciousness that he’s not sure he’s ever felt before, all the telempathic processes in his brain halted, solid in warm amber. 

“I don’t save everyone,” Louis says. 

“People can’t save everyone.” Harry’s hand has come down to his face again, and he presses the edge of his thumb into the side of Louis’ mouth, the corner of his lip. It’s weird. It’s possessive. It’s a delicate touch on a delicate place that nobody ever touches. Louis should be bothered by it, but it’s comforting. He lets it happen, lets Harry’s fingers range, curious and invasive and wanting things that no one else touches.

“I’m not _people,”_ Louis sighs. 

“Well whatever you are, special, superhuman, mindmapper, you get to have me,” Harry says. “ _Your_ boundary partner. You can trust me, even if you can’t read me. That’s what trust is, you know.” 

“I don’t trust you,” Louis says automatically. And it’s then, really giving into the fog, that Louis abruptly realizes who Lanie is chasing. It’s always there, you just miss it until you see it. It’s in the details, the small details, the backward looking details, the ugly rural histories that people want to ignore. Her emotions are….cavernous, absence, a black hole lurking behind the story of Lanie Price. A gravity well, capturing all of her vivid light, invisible because of that. It was old, old as Canyon Falls, old as a lonely kid shut away in a shitty trailer bedroom because he can’t stop touching people and stealing all their feelings. Grasping out for a hand before you can stand on your own. 

Only a few people in the world that could apply to. 

“Oh, you trust me,” Harry says. “You wouldn’t have brought me, and nobody else, if you didn't trust me.” 

Horribly, Louis realizes as he slips entirely into sleep, Harry is _right._  

 

***

 

Louis had been five years old and only vaguely aware of the concept of lying when he’d started hooking into his mother’s late night crying sessions in the kitchen and his father became a specter made from someone else’s memories. He’d been twelve years old when he’d fallen in love for the first time. Deep, despairing love with the boy who worked behind the counter of the bowling alley, until a Saturday afternoon when he’d reached across the counter to pick up a pair of shoes and _read_ the boy, contempt and irritation and something worse, slimy and wriggling underneath his skin, like an alien bodysnatcher in a horror movie. 

Your first loves, whether tall beautiful boys behind counters or parents you thought wouldn’t make mistakes, never survive the truth. Or at least, not the _whole_ truth, the flickering feelings you’re not supposed to be exposed to, the shards of endless possibilities rippling out from people’s imaginations. Louis learned early on that half of emotion _is_ merely imagination, hypotheticals and scenarios blooming like watercolors across the unwitting pages of people’s minds. But it’s also one of the things that makes the truly bad people easier to detect: there’s a monochrome to the tight circle of their feelings, a repetition to their emotional experiments. 

Growing up poor leaves you with a pervasive awareness of space, and so does growing up different. Louis rejected twelve apartments in the city before he found one with the right ceilings. The apartment had been the pet project of the student of a famous architect, and her indulgence ran thick in the walls of the structure. They shot up,unconstrained by another floor, sky-high, ridiculously high. It was a _waste of space,_ that was how was realtor feeling about it, standing behind Louis and wondering with a sense of resigned apathy whether this too-somber kid in the too-nice pants was gonna actually yield a commission. Could’ve fit a dozen closets in that space, could’ve been a kitchen or a second floor study or something _useful_ that would add to the laundry list of attributes that the realtors depended on to turn gullible new money into proud new home owners. It was a shame, really, that this property kept hanging on the catalogue like a souring fruit. No one had lived in it for years. The realtor had even come to feel creeped out by it, all glossy show furniture and mathematical decisions. Even the artistry of the apartment felt calculated, the lines too perfect, the air too sparse despite its volume. 

Louis’ mother had found him easily that Saturday, coming home from another shift at the hospital with fatigue hanging heavy in her body like a sandbag. There was barely any space in their tiny trailer home, certainly no space to disguise the badly muffled sounds of snotty little boy tears. The trailer was just a single long tunnel with a curtain division at the back of it, a shared delusion that they maintained that they had rooms of their own. She wasn’t supposed to draw back the curtain but she did that night, Mom immunity in play and a thick blanket in her hands. They hugged like that by then: she would throw the blanket over him or wrap her own hands in it like soft thick mittens, and shove them around his body even as he yelled and protested, both of them laughing. 

She’d always taught him that, no matter what. That they were going to find a way, even if she didn’t understand what was happening to her boy, even if they had nothing. To never waste space. At twenty-three years old, Louis negotiated an astronomical signing bonus from an increasingly frayed recruiter at the division, and bought her a house. 

It was years later when Louis finally got around to buying the lost architect’s apartment for himself, all cash down. The realtor’s eyes had bugged out hilariously. 

 

***

 

Louis wakes up on the couch with his grey pajamas neatly folded in a stack on his stomach. He’s lying like a corpse with his hands folded one over the other on his chest, because this is what passes for a sense of humor in the troubled brain of Harry Styles. There’s a post-it note stuck to his forehead. 

_Showering,_ it says in black sharpie, _obviously. CHANGE UR RIDIC CLOTHES_

Harry’s in the bathroom and the shower’s running. Louis glances at the clock and is immediately horrified. He’s slept for _two hours._ But he feels amazing, and hungry. He’s feels as though he’s been absorbing baking in his sleep, tv clearly having a marathon. There’s a large man with an extremely red face wrestling dough on the screen and making small, aggrieved noises and Louis watches him for a soothing minute. 

There are ten texts in a row from Liam, which isn’t as much as it could’ve been. They’re mostly curt little updates and a request to Skype if their internet gets better, with a suspicious tone like Liam thinks that Louis has sabotaged the internet personally on some kind of Die Hard mission to hunt down Lanie Price without any adult supervision. As if. _Pls don’t break Harry, the division can’t possibly afford to go through another twenty-month hiring cycle even if we ever find another boundary case whos actually powerful enough to do shit for you,_ the final text reads. 

Louis changes into his pajamas right there the living room in order to keep an eye on the show. They’ve progressed to something French and multilayered that involves copious butter and Louis is trying to say the name of the pastry out loud under his breath when the emotional hook pulls him under. 

Fear. Certainty of being better than people which is, ultimately, a mistake. Louis can’t tell whether he’s tied into her past or her future. For some girls it’s all fear, all the way. 

_Smart girls especially._ Well that wasn’t his thought, was it? Louis feels tired and sick in the back of his throat and it’s not him at all, it’s her. 

_Why’d you check out, cop?_ Usually words aren’t a thing through a telempathic hook, but Louis gets them from her clear as day. It’s a testament to her intelligence that she’s figured out how to be verbal on the telempathic plane. It had taken Louis five years of training to even communicate a location specific to the division’s highest ranking telempathic counselor. 

_I’m not a cop._

_Then where’d you go?_

_Technically I went no where,_ Louis thinks. It’s difficult. 

_Don’t be an ass,_ she thinks, _more of an ass than usual._ The words fail and he gets a blast of nerves and query, _who are you._

He doesn’t like this at all, not even for its novelty, the rifling sensation of someone falling into his personality and summing it up in a glance. Lanie Price is self-assured and stunningly maintaining her calm for someone who is, in fact, desperately panicked, and basically a teenager. 

Louis remembers Harry in the bathroom earlier. _Give me something I can work with._

Louis isn’t sure whether he’s able to put it into thoughts at all, but he pushes all the emotion that he can at her. And it’s not fake: he’s fucking terrified, that she won’t be found, that she’ll be something different than she should be when she’s found. _I’m someone who wants to find people._

_He’s in trouble. I’m in trouble. They haven’t figured it out yet, but I think they will, I can feel you don’t want me to, but I have to,_ she thinks, voice as clear as a bell. Lanie Price is really fucking special, and the problem with special girls is that everybody wants them. _Don’t tell anyone. Please. Don’t tell anyone else. Help me out._

The emotion floods him, hers or his, he’s not sure. An obligation that tastes sour, skating over the cortex, shoving fingernails into the folds of tissue. _You can’t tell anyone about me._ It’s not an unfamiliar feeling. 

Louis gasps awake. He’s pressed up against the window, and there’s a drip of condensation from where his cheek has been against the glass. A shudder runs through his body. 

Lanie Price is a telempath. Of fucking course she is. The realization of it pours through him like ice water, freezing his veins. She’s a top-class telempath with barely controlled powers, reaching out through the wasteland of her own memories and finding _him._ It’s not that Louis got a hook on her and now can’t let it go. It’s that she’s not letting him go. She probably didn’t even know she was doing it until now, until he’d gotten distracted enough by pastry and Harry was shielded by the bathroom tile and Louis slipped under. 

There’s a shudder, a blast of wind at the window. A mass of ice fallen off the roof of the cabin, and hitting against the wall. It feels too close. 

The water turns off in the bathroom.  “Hey, what was that?” Harry calls. 

“Nothing,” Louis says. “The wind. Lanie Price is with her dad.” 

 

***

 

Lanie Price’s dad had exited her life like he’d come into it in the first place: with very little ability to explain his choices and even less concern for the people he would’ve been explaining them to. He had brains—not up to Lanie’s kind of brains, but enough to be discontent—brains but no patience, and the bad temper that takes those two attributes and makes them terribly dangerous, boiled milk curdling.

He’d gotten married young, because you get married young in Canyon Falls. It’s more economically stable and it’s something to do. He’d had a kid without meaning to and she’d been a whole lot of things he hadn’t cared for. But then again, he’d blinked and a few years had gone by and she’d been something else. Smart, sharp, funny. Unnaturally savvy in the way she seemed to understand him, even though Daniel Price didn’t particularly understand himself most of the time, walking around under a perpetual rainstorm.

It didn’t stop him from getting divorced young, because you also get divorced young in Canyon Falls. He lost his job, because everyone lost their jobs, and he started selling drugs, because everyone did drugs. But Lanie’s mother had brains too and a ticket to the big city besides, so she erased him. It should’ve just been a fast track downward, a rusted-over pitstop in Lanie’s life, Canyon Falls, learned to read there and not much else. On paper it was only a detail: former dad, out of the picture, no contact. They’d cut him out when Lanie was too young to make decisions about it. He’d moved several states away to a city with worse legal jobs but a better black market, and that was that. 

But that was on paper. In her _head,_ he had grown. Out of sight of the analysts, maybe out of her sight too. But some people get to shape holes in your life and it’s not because they’re worthy of you, but just because they were _there._ There for a laughably small time in comparison to the rest of her life, a quick blip of a few summers, random weekends getting picked up in a rusty truck and sat down in front of inappropriate movies. But emotions aren’t always about things that are real _._ Louis knows that better than most. Emotions can be about stories, about the gaps in your own story that you try to fill backwards. Like the idea that if only you still had that one person, everything would fix itself. 

Lanie Price grew up loving mysteries. She had her finger on the flickering pulse of everyone else’s mystery, had a secondary surge of strong telempathy in her freshman year biology class, and started looking for the FBI. She kept the telempathy under wraps like only the kids from places like Canyon Falls can: secret keepers, the whole lot of them. Louis recognizes that too, recognizes the tight-lipped silence, recognizes being the kid of a single mom who works too hard for too little. 

So Lanie Price gets the keys. And what’s the mystery she looks up? She looks up her dad. 

 

***

 

_“God fucking fuck, with a shit sandwich, for fuck’s sake,”_ Liam’s voice crackles through the bad connection. 

“Yeah,” Louis says.

Harry’s been tapping at indeterminate computery black box things with skills Louis hadn’t realized he had, but he can’t get their proxy into the division to work, so they’re on speakerphone. 

“Don’t break it, Liam will blame me,” Louis says, hanging over Harry and resting his elbows on Harry’s shoulder muscles, just to be annoying, definitely not for the thickly-sweet stolen pleasure of pressing closer to him. “I can’t believe it’s a literal black box, everything in our lives is symbolic, Harry,”

“It’s the fucking terminal. For this, I got a computer science degree,” Harry says, rolling his eyes, but keeping his back still. Louis contemplates the mysteries, which include at some low level the fact that he doesn’t know as much about Harry as he’d now like to, and that’s problematic. 

_“How did we miss this. We wrote it off because of the no contact since early childhood and he hadn’t left his home or anything but. Fucking damn. He hasn’t even been out of his home state in the last ten years.”_

“We weren’t looking for someone _she_ would run _to,”_ Harry says. “We thought someone took her. She took herself.” 

_“Christ,”_ Liam yells at somebody, and there’s a muffled scrambling noise of division chaos. They’re not really able to help past Louis’ amazing emotional contribution that _things feel bad for her._

Louis sighs, moves away from Harry and sprawls backwards on the couch, looking up at the ceiling. The FBI reluctantly admitted, after two hours bearing the brunt of Liam’s deeply offended face, that Daniel Price was on the verge of being pulled into a drug sting operation, that they’d utterly missed the fact that _one of their special candidates_ was an unsupported secret telempath with the potential to steal herself access to their databases on upcoming sting investigations, that sometimes even very smart students make dumbass decisions without talking to anyone else. 

“She’s just trying to get him out,” Louis says, tracing the eighties ceiling re-do with his eyes. “She thinks she can save him. She thinks this is her destiny. Telempathy…it makes you feel like a god, sometimes. It’s like a way to cope with it, if you don’t have someone to knock you to your senses. She might even be still hooked into him, after all this time. He doesn’t deserve it, it’s delusion, but no one’s ever taught her that.” 

Harry looks at him, a sharp cut of green. “She can’t save him,” he says. 

“I know,” Louis agrees. “I’ve been trying to convince her, but. She’s a top level telempath and she’s got me on the wire. She can plug and play my brain, and she won’t tell me where they are.” 

Harry moves closer, as if on instinct. Louis feels every step toward the couch. “Well that part is done,” Harry says, looming over him. Louis rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out.

“I’ve got to try to reach her again,” Louis says. He _wants_ Harry to move closer, wants Harry to scoop him up and hold him close, and it’s in every way not helpful. 

Harry shakes his head. 

_“We’ve raided his apartment but I can already tell you he’s long gone,”_ Liam says, cutting into the silent fight that Louis is having with Harry. 

“ _They’ve pulled out, we have no idea where. So we know who she’s with, and he’s taken her somewhere, goddamn fuck, right up the chain of his suppliers, probably. Lou, he’s been in deep shit with these people for a while. He’s a nobody, street drugs, but they do everything. You understand? Trafficking, everything. If he’s got a telempath to trade, he could be making that trade.”_

He fucking understands. Crimes are like emotions, all connected. Some rural hick in a no-name town can still go up the chain if he’s got a fast enough track. If he’s got something to bargain with, something that’s big money.

“I’m going back into her head, I’ll knock Harry out and I’ll do it, how about,” Louis says. 

“I would very much, with every fiber of my body, enjoy you trying,” Harry says. 

 

***

 

It goes on like this for a while. Somehow they reach the end of the day, Louis mostly bracketing himself with pillows on the couch and making snarky remarks to cover the horrible crawling anxiousness, and Harry mostly hovering too close to him and turning up the volume on the tv again. Liam keeps them updated on the great white noise of nothingness that is FBI strike teams laboriously starting a perimeter search investigation around Daniel Price’s movements and contacts. Louis starts re-reading the file for something, anything, like they aren’t losing the last precious window of time they have to find her before she’s out of their grasp forever, venting away like oxygen. 

At one in the morning, Harry walks Louis physically from the living room into the bedroom and bundles him forcefully into bed. Louis intends to stay awake and keep Harry awake out of spite but Harry throws a heavy leg over Louis’ thigh and sticks his face in the bend of Louis’ shoulder and neck _like that’s an acceptable thing to do,_ breathing warm and unembarrassed against his ear, and in the middle of reciting all of the things he’s learned can go wrong with spun sugar, Louis falls asleep. 

 

***

 

Louis wakes up outside. 

It’s sheeting snow in every direction and it’s night, he’s blind. He’s barefoot in pajamas with Lanie’s emotions running through his arms and dripping out his fingertips. 

He stands there for long seconds, disoriented. Too long. He’s already been out here too long, the fine needle jabs of early frostbite starting to give way to a tell-tale numbness. What happened? Louis remembers waking up with a hot throat in the middle of the cabin, the heating air too dry, Harry jammed up and spooning him, the very-bad-not-useful moment of sitting there _deeply_ appreciating _Harry spooning him,_ then getting out of bed to get a glass of water. 

Ah. Then Lanie, as soon as Louis had put enough space between himself and Harry in the cabin, whirling back into his brain with all the cataclysmic power of a very frightened prodigy. So Lanie’s finally realized that her dad’s not driving her back to college, has she? And she’s gotten a hell of a lot better at the hook.

_The emotions are, as ever, a thousand things: disappointment. Fooling yourself. Gradually watching for the road signs. Suspicion. Fear, fear, fear. The knowledge that you were smarter than your dad even when you were a little kid and the guilt that you were maybe manipulating him. The precious clear-hearted desire to do better by it. The love, the love, the love. The little kid love, unfathomable, unconditional, necessary. Love me, dad. I’m grown up, dad. I have power, dad. I’ll save you, then you’ll actually show up. Right? Right? I can be good enough, enough to convince him. They’re in a car and they’re driving far and there’s some goddamn really bothersome cop guy out there LIKE ME that guy, never told anyone about what I could do because the world’s taught me how little it’s ever going to understand but —_

_I UNDERSTAND,_ Louis had tried to get across. _I don’t know why he’s like this, but you have to let go of him and trust me instead._

But she’s gone again. Louis has gotten at least a little bit closer. They’re in a car on the highway headed to the border, so they’re not there yet, the final destination, whatever Daniel Price keeps lying about. They’ve got to find her before he succeeds. 

Louis is standing in the snow and it feels strangely dry. It’s white like powdered sugar, all that sugar work spun. Can’t let it crystallize, got to keep the temperature right. Oh, shit. Louis realizes with a start that he is actually, in his real physical life, in a very bad situation. 

His feet don’t even want to move, his limbs are so locked he can’t even fall over. He blinks against the dark. Isn’t that what it always is? Harry will have the last laugh, then. Not that Harry will feel like it. Louis should’ve actually listened to him, and now Louis can’t even save himself. 

He’s just going to be here, stupid, dying for no reason at all, because his body can’t catch up with the powers that his mind cooked up, because he got caught on his own hook and dragged out to sea. 

Louis wants to laugh with the irony of it, and there’s nobody even here to appreciate the joke. If Harry weren’t a boundary case, Louis could send his own mind out like a searchlight and find the cabin again, find Harry. If he knew Harry’s emotions, if he could _read_ him. 

_Wait._ Harry is exactly that, _not readable._ In the meshing madness that is a world of emotional contagion, Louis reaches out with the faltering strength of his mind to find it. The safe space. Harry’s the eye of the storm, the centerpoint where the madness falls away. Louis moves toward it, fights through the snow, walks blind through the dark.

“Thank god,” Harry says. His face breaks through snowflakes, lit by a flashlight. They land on his face, on his eyelashes.

“No, probably the road spirit,” Louis says. 

“Whatever, you _idiot,_ you terrible, terrible gift, _”_ Harry says. His face is so pale. Louis has fallen and Harry’s caught him, their faces close together, Louis is close enough to reach out and touch the snowflakes melting on his cheek, wondering. 

 

***

 

Louis wakes up again, this time in a bathtub of hot water with no shirt and no socks. 

“Thanks for at least leaving my pajama pants on,” Louis says. “This is getting old.”

Harry scowls at him from the other side of the tub. Louis supposes he should be grateful that Harry’s not holding him like an octopus or something, that he’s braced against the other end and they’re facing each other and Louis only has to deal with Harry’s legs trapping his down under the water.

“So Lanie can move your body?” Harry says. “Don’t think I haven’t texted Liam. He’s authorized me full medical authority to do _whatever_ to keep you from reading her. Are you ok? Are you warm?” 

“I dunno, yeah, I’m warm.” Louis says. He's got a headache still, but there's no trace of the emotional residue. Harry is magic, and Louis presses his leg into Harry’s, like he could even get closer. The boundary power floods through him, a critical safety net. His fingers are flushed with color, heat sucked back up through the warm water and circulating in his bloodstream. Louis flexes them. 

“It’s a pretty known hazard we don’t really talk about much. I mean not to boast, but not many people can withstand very long emotional hooks anyway. You start doing weird stuff like walking around, subconscious protocols trying to interpret it. Think of it like extremely terrible sleepwalking. Harry, you can’t just keep me from reading her forever. It’s the only way I’m gonna _find_ her. She’s in the car heading to the border and we’ll never catch them in time.” 

“It’s not happening,” Harry says stubbornly. He looks fierce and determined about it and Louis curses every single division recruitment tactic that specialized in somehow finding these people. Even Harry has it, of course he does, that knuckle-clenched resolution under a pretty surface. 

“You can’t stop me,” Louis says. “It’s the point. It’s the point of being a telempath. It’s the only thing that makes it something more than a fucking curse.” 

“Louis. It’s a gift,” Harry says. 

Louis lets his head hit the back of the bathtub. “Where’s my gift receipt? I’d rather have socks.” 

Harry smiles, but sadly. He puts a hand down into the water and clasps Louis’ ankle. It’s comforting. 

“All those people get you,” Harry says. “And who do you get, Lou?”

Louis has no idea what that means so he only blinks angrily at Harry, and then down at his knees rising out of the water. He pokes at the skin and it blooms pink under the white, a good sign. Lanie had felt cold, driving through the winter in an old car with poor heating and bad insulation, with some stupid nineteen year old college kid’s version of a winter coat.

“Here, eat a candy bar,” Harry says, picking it up from the floor of the bathroom, thankfully still in a wrapper. 

“Did you get this when you went in to get our food, in town?” Louis asks, accusatory. “Are you bribing me with low class roadtrip food?”

“ _Eat_ it, every trip to the vending machine in the third floor hallway produces a positive effect on you,” Harry says forcefully. Louis shoves the entire thing in his mouth in one go. 

“The solution to everything isn’t the path of the most comfort,” Louis says, around the cheap and salty chocolate which still manages to be restorative in some profound way. The thought that Harry had gotten it for him, like the touch of Harry’s fingers in his hair, hits him between the eyes and makes him feel stupid. 

“At least I let myself acknowledge the need for comfort at all,” Harry shoots back.

“Honestly, since we’re trapped here, there’s something I’ve always wanted to know. Why are you even _here_ ,” Louis says, exasperated. “If you’re someone with so many choices, you know? If you’re so obsessed with, like, getting me to not work so hard. You can’t bully me into changing my mind on this. You can’t possibly think that this is another version of our stupid argument about your life, versus my life. You can say all the shit you want. You _still_ don’t know anything about me.” 

“My sister is a telempath,” Harry says. 

“Really?” Louis asks, startled. 

They sometimes come in pairs, now that he thinks about it. Not often, because telempaths are rarer than rare, but where there’s a telempath there’s often the other. Louis had been strange in that regard, too, alone even then. Harry’s still clasping his ankle, and he gives it a squeeze. 

Louis tries to think out how to phrase it, but Harry beats him to the question.

“She’s fine,” he says softly. “She’s a very low level telempath, barely even detectible. We found it out early, too. She works with kids, she’s a grade school teacher and a guidance counselor.” 

“That’s nice,” Louis says. 

“Why do you _think_ I joined up?” Harry asks. 

“I suppose that I thought it was a power trip,” Louis says honestly. 

Harry grimaces. “I can…see that,” he says, reluctantly. And there’s that grin again, goddamn it, it’s like the quick intoxicating sweetness of black coffee with the sugar all pooled at the bottom. Unexpected. Overwhelming. 

“Well, not that,” he says. “I’m here because I think that my powers mean something, just as much as yours do. It’s not some accident I take advantage of. It’s a choice. And the experience, the _hedonism,_ I dunno. I’m honestly not trying to fight about it. It’s just how I cope with it all,” Harry says. “The crimes. The near crimes. The people with all their awful stories. Watching you have to go through what you have to go through. The division is…well, _you_ know. I don’t know what it’s like for you but even for those of us who aren’t—even for the rest of us it’s hard. I like to experience as much, as many good things as I can.” 

“Hedonist,” Louis echoes, but he can’t put any bite behind it at all and it only sounds small, suddenly, and maybe traitorously fond. Harry just tilts his head and then they’re both laughing at each other, at the lunacy of this situation. Thigh-deep in hot bathwater and trapped in a cabin. Louis laughs, sucking chocolate out from his back molars. 

“Jealous?” Harry says with an upturned emphasis that makes it sound smug.

Louis is a lot of things. Jealous like Harry wouldn’t believe, struck with something much deeper than jealousy, so deep it makes him feel like he’s been winded. He looks away. “I can get out now,” he says. “Full feeling in my hands and feet and everything.” 

“Full feeling,” Harry sniffs, but he still pulls his legs back and stands up, splashing Louis in a way that is _definitely_ deliberate. “I’ll believe that when I see it.” 

 

***

 

Louis is warm in two pairs of fresh pajamas, double-layered with Harry’s giant college sweatshirt, and Harry is heating soup up in the kitchen for a five am _well what the fuck is happening to us meal times might as well have no meaning_ breakfast, when Louis makes the critical tactical error of using the bathroom and closing the bathroom door. He’s washing his hands when Lanie Price tries to hook back in and the world shatters. 

“Come _on,_ seriously? Not here. Harry!” Louis manages. 

He knows, immediately. It’s the bulletpoints in a pamphlet he saw, a long time ago in a small counseling office. The headache is like a fine sliver of glass shoved into his eyeballs, the world is going dark around the edges. There’s a limit to how long you should stay connected to another mind, and he’s reached his. 

“I always sort of hoped there wouldn’t be one,” Louis says. 

“Let me _in_ ,” Harry is yelling on the other side of the door, rattling the knob. 

Louis finds that he’s leaning against the bathroom door. He makes his way to sitting, as close to Harry as he can without actually touching him. He doesn’t try the knob. 

“I can’t,” Louis says. This is his chance. Well, not his chance. _Her_ chance. “I have to find her.” 

“Louis, no, no, no, you can be an idiot in every regard but this, nope, no,” Harry says. “Come on. Come out. If you go back under you might not come back.” 

Does it matter? Louis is pretty sure he doesn’t have a choice anymore. He’s sinking, further and further down, and he has no idea where the escape hatch is.

“Come on, stay with me,” Harry says through the door, suddenly. “Tell me about the best sex you’ve ever had.”  

Louis is still _Louis_ enough to hear a snort come out of his throat. “Typical. You’re the worst,” he says, “I’m not doing that.” 

Harry makes a humming noise back. “Why, not good enough suddenly? Come on, Louis, if you can boast endlessly about everything else, why not this? An overachiever like you, I can only imagine.”

The rush of irritation is oddly enough to ground Louis back in the bathroom. He’s breathing, up from the surface of the dark pool. He kicks a foot out. He’s on the tiles and it’s cold, sprawled out with his limbs loose. 

“It’s not like you could _feel_ it if you accidentally turned me on,” Harry says through the door. “Best sex you’ve ever had, go. Any more hesitation I'm gonna have to start accusing you of not getting any.” 

“What the _fuck,”_ Louis hisses. All he can see is the chipped wood of the bathroom cabinet. What a prosaic thing to be the last thing he sees before his mind shatters. “Everyone pretends I’m the psycho but you are the psycho. I hope you don’t have tell my mom about this. Or worse, Liam, in a final report on me.” 

Harry says sharply, “You _don’t_ have good sex. Really? _You_?” 

“You, if I weren’t actively losing my mind, I would put itching powder in your Hawaiian shirts,” Louis sputters, grasping and too close to the psychic break, but Harry is just plowing on, loud and abrasive. 

“It’s true,” Harry says in a tone of great marvel. “Oh my god, of course it’s true. I really had you all the wrong way, you know. You put on a good act. But of course, now that I think about it. You can't even eat diner breakfasts, of _course_ you don't have good sex in your life. This explains a lot, honestly.” 

“I don't eat at diners because of the _number of people who touch my food,”_ Louis spits. He knows what it looks like from the outside, the precision with which he lives his life and the climate-controlled air of it. And he doesn't usually bother to correct anyone but Harry is so goddamn infuriating it keeps spilling out his mouth. “Have you ever bit into a pancake and tasted twenty years of unmet potential, simmering over the griddle with the sausage?” 

“No, I haven't. Does that mean that the number of people you let touch you is similarly low?” Harry says. “It must be difficult, now that I'm thinking about it. You’re a telempath, your partners always know that... potential. God knows I’ve thought about _that_. But what must it be like, the mess of other people’s emotions, must be terribly _distracting._ Do you even have a moment to think about your own experience, or are you just caught up in theirs, the whole time? Do they just obsess on what you can read from them, they must. Seems...sad.” 

“Shut _up,”_ Louis snarls.  

“I absolutely will not shut up,” Harry says, “Because talking to me about this is the one thing keeping you in your fucking body and not losing your mind.” 

He's right. Louis realizes it abruptly, that he's fully present in the bathroom, blood pounding in his ears and thoughts squarely in his own head. The cracking has stopped. 

“No,” Louis says, “No, this can’t be a solution.” 

“I’m the boundary expert,” Harry says and he has the _gall_ to sound _smug._

“I would actually rather go through cracking than have this conversation,” Louis manages to say, bleakly. 

Harry taps on the door with a knuckle. 

“Well guess what, that's not an option, so we are going to sit here and talk about sex, until you can move your body and open the fucking door,” Harry says briskly, and every atom of Louis’ body tries its valiant best to implode, but it’s his own actual legitimate and real feeling, so Harry’s still _right._

“When was the last time someone asked you what _you_ want?” Harry says. “Months, maybe even years?” 

Louis smiles in the dark, a sharp break on an uneven surface. 

“No one ever has,” he says.

Apparently that's enough of a surprise to actually shut Harry up. But then it's not better because Harry breathes out. It’s a harsh breath, pushed from the throat, grasping and surprised _._ Louis doesn’t need to be an telempath to interpret it. He doesn’t know if it’s just his imagination or reality through the door, feeling the heat of Harry on the other side, the flex in his muscles against the thin, old wood. 

“You want to know what _I_ would do to you, given the chance?” Harry says with longing, not like a question but like the beginning of a story. 

“What the fuck,” Louis says. He’s shocked, and the shock is a real thing, visceral and here and belonging only to his own mind. It’s not that he hasn’t thought about Harry but--god. But it’s not only shock. There’s a curling traitorous part of his mind that’s sat up and said _please._

“I think you want to talk about this,” Harry says. “Because what must it be like, a whole lifetime of telling other people how they feel and never getting to talk about how you feel. I want to know, Louis. I’ve always wanted to know, what would it be like to get under all your words. What would it be like to pin you down, stop the endless way you always slip out, the ways you fool everybody. What would you say then? What would you want _,_ if you just let yourself?” 

Louis swallows hard. He can feel the blood pulsing in his throat, the hot spark in his groin that’s awfully visceral and not at all an accident. Louis scrapes the pad of his thumb over his eyelid and wonders if it will help. He thinks not, raw on the inside, raw on the outside. He’s past being able to be anything but stupidly straightforward, dangerously honest. 

“Or if you let me,” Harry says.

“Stop it, don't pretend you actually want that,” Louis says bleakly. “Or if you do, it’s not that. I know what you’d do. You’d do what you always do, you’d take exactly what you want and then be done with it. You could never understand why I don’t live the same way,” Louis says. 

He can’t deny, even to himself, that he’s thought about it. He’s thought about it for the entire time that he’s known Harry. Underneath every argument and late night and stale briefing room shouting match there’s been that, like a flickering flame above a gas line. A dozen wrapped cases and half a dozen saves, half a dozen moments when Harry’s grabbed his arm or his neck and tamped down the floods that threaten to drown him. And every time he’s needed it Harry’s been there, infuriatingly good, and looking at Louis like he could eat him. If Louis ever said _yes._

Harry hums from the other side of the door. He must be sitting against it, because Louis can hear him move from an inch away, the shift of the back of his shirt and hair on the wood. 

“I am, quite genuinely, never pretending. Which makes one of us.” 

Louis doesn't say anything, and Harry plows on, sounding thoughtful and almost detached, like they’re talking about protocol or cafeteria choices or something that’s not putting a fire underneath the surface of Louis’ body, confused and alive. 

“I bet you’ve thought about it. I bet I know what you’ve thought. You think I’d have you, what, in an office building? Up against the glass in the briefing room? Throw you down so fast and hard your pants are left wrapped around your ankles? Maybe it would be late night, working a case. You’d be yelling about something, and I’d finally lose my patience. I’d push you down on the table, take you right there.” 

Louis has imagined it, and worse things. He flushes all the way to the roots of his hair with the images, grateful at least that Harry isn’t a telempath himself. He’s imagined...Harry pressing him up to the glass window of the briefing room, or in the filthy hallway of the records department, in front of everybody. In a closet, in the close stuffy air of the offices.

“Maybe I’d take you,” Louis says. 

Harry laughs, but not unkindly. “Sure, not at all opposed. But _Louis._ You work so goddamn hard, I rather imagine that you stay awake picturing somebody else doing the work. But you know, I do think you get it wrong, and that’s the difference between us.” 

Louis releases a long breath of air. He’s taut against the floor, body flooded with the heat of the conversation and the embarrassment and the strangeness of it. All these feelings in the dark, and too many of them his. 

“You do whatever you want. I don't. That's the difference between us, and you can't stand it,” Louis says. He's never really understood _why_ it bothers Harry so much.  

“No, the difference between us is that even in your most secret fantasies, you punish yourself,” Harry says. 

“And you’re wrong about me. That’s not what I’d do at all. But you’re right that I grew up rich,” Harry says. “There’s even a country house that none of us really know what to do with. You know, old stone, big red tile roof, all that crap? Growing flowers on the walls that we still pay somebody to take care of. I’d _take you,_ to that house.” 

“You’re ridiculous,” Louis says, quietly, and it only sounds encouraging. Harry knocks on the bathroom door again, a tiny knock. He puts his fingers down on the floor, pushes them as far as he can under the frame of it. Louis can feel it even though he can’t touch Harry’s skin directly, still can’t move his limbs. 

“I’d start by finding out a thousand things that you like. I’ve already started. You like watching people do things they’re good at. Noncompetitive baking shows. More vegetables than you’ll admit. You need more sleep, and the country house has like, _ten_ different bedrooms. I’d make up a bedroom on the east side so that you can wake up without an alarm clock, with the sunrise. That’s how I grew up, you know? Rich and stupid but also just _nice,_ in the country without alarm clocks.” 

“It’s a good place,” Harry goes on. His voice is thick, deep, soft. “It’s peaceful. You’d get _time_ there. Maybe we’d….I don’t know, maybe eventually you’d just wake up and realize that you like talking to me. We’d have dinner and take walks and watch a lot of crap tv. You could criticize my cooking. I could introduce you to the concept of color. You could meet the people at the local pub and get good at darts. You’d probably get stupid good at darts. Maybe one night you’d have won a dart game and we’d be coming home with our mouths tasting like beer and you’d say something really truly awful and I’d kiss you.”

“I can’t believe this has turned into a romantic comedy,” Louis says. The back of his neck feels warm. “I’m offering exhibitionist hate-sex on top of the briefing table, the stuff of legends, and you’re acting like you want to make me _soup_ or something—” 

“I like taking care of people, that’s the deep dark secret,” Harry says. “You like to save people but I’m here because I like to take care of people. And that briefing table is disgusting.” 

“Liam cleans it every morning,” Louis protests. It’s a weak feint in light of all the loosening warmth of his joints. He wants so many things, wants starlight over an old country house, to chase down this feeling of fire and keep it, selfishly, all for himself. 

“Shut up, I’m not gonna fuck you on top of single use bleach wipes and the panic and stress of everybody else’s emotions at work,” Harry says, and Louis loses all his words again. 

“And you pretend to have classy tastes,” Harry says. “I’d kiss you into a completely new plush queen size bed, that no one but you has ever touched, _after_ you’ve eaten dinner. Nobody else around for miles, nothing but birds and gardens. I’d hold you down into it and make you tell me what you want. It would be slow, and there wouldn’t be anything else to pay attention to. After _you_ tell me what you want, in the dark, with me chasing down every single thing your body loves. You know I can, but if you want it for yourself, you’ll have to tell me.” 

“I want it,” Louis admits, helpless, because he does, _that’s_ the deep dark secret. He wants being held, he wants to not think for every waking moment about being in control, he wants someone else to take that from him. 

“Open the door,” Harry says, and Louis feels him move, feels the shielding power of Harry’s boundary all around him. 

“What?” Louis says. He realizes that he’s been able to move, that he’s moved his own hand to work it under the gap of the wooden door, and Harry’s touching him, fingertips to fingertips. 

“Well, fine, you’re good at your job, ok, all right,” Louis says when he opens the door with a flaming face and a growing desire to jump into the waterfall-less canyon. 

Harry looks at him with familiar exasperation and wholly unfamiliar care, so unguarded that it stops all the defensive words already half-forming in Louis’ mind. 

“Louis,” Harry says, “I’m good at _you._ And if we weren’t in the middle of a case, christ, just.” He puts a hand out, very slowly, and traces a finger on Louis’ cheek. Louis puts his own hand up and catches it, skin to skin contact, so very useful. 

“I just want you to know I believe that,” Harry says quietly. “That I’m not out to get something, even if you think the whole world is. I’d only want what you’d want to give,”

Louis stares at him. “Harry, that’s it,” 

Harry sighs, sounding frustrated. “We’re really not in a place to have this conversation, you’re totally compro—”

“No, now _you_ shut up, you cute  moron,” Louis says, patting Harry’s hand, and pushing past him, because _fuck_ if he’s going to do this in the bathroom and wind up in that fucking tub _again._ “Lanie. That’s it, with _Lanie._ I know what to do, I know how to reach her.” 

“What are you talking about?” Harry yelps. 

Louis sits cross-legged on the bed and clicks the remote. “Yes!” He cheers, because Bake Off is still playing, an endless marathon faithfully here for him. 

“Louis, oh god, did you actually crack,” Harry wails. Louis rolls his eyes and points the remote at him. 

“It’s what you said. It’s not about distance and control, it’s about _surrender,_ isn’t it. I’ve never been hooked in with another telempath and we’ve both been fighting each other this whole time. I didn’t see it, I didn’t _feel_ it until you said that. Harry, you have to let me try again. I can reach her, I can figure out where she is.” 

Harry folds and unfolds his arms, rakes a hand through his hair, and looks around the room unhappily. “I don’t want you to,” he says. 

“I know,” Louis says, “But I have to try it. Because, who else has she got?” 

Harry sighs, and Louis knows that he’s won. He knows, with a brilliantly satisfying clarity that he tucks away into his heart for later, that he will _always win_ with Harry. 

“She’s got us,” Harry says. 

 

  
***

 

Lanie Price is scared. 

Fear is multicolored, infinite and nothing at the same time. It’s shallow lungs and a tightening body trapped in space, it’s the illusion that you’re all alone. _You’re not alone,_ Louis thinks. And he pushes that feeling at her, through the towering endless miles between their experience, two human strangers trying to make some kind of way. 

She’s never met another telempath like her, and Louis knows that feeling too. She’s hooked in without meaning to, without knowing what it’s about, because after all, who ever told her? She realizes it hurt him and she’s pretty fucking scared of that too. And Louis pushes forgiveness back. It’s that most surprising thing that makes him feel, _finally,_ in control. Funny how surrender can do that. 

_You have to tell me where you are, and we’ll come get you._

He can feel the bone-crunch of her fear, the idea that she’s going to lose something she can’t possibly lose. She came all the way out here with the hope that she could be the superhero, and maybe Daniel Price has done what he always does and let her down, but she _can’t let him go_ because then _what is the fucking point of being here, of doing this, of going through every single day of a life of reading other people, feeling their needs running through you._

_Because,_ Louis thinks, _because there are things out here to do. People you could be. There are people you still have to meet. There are thirty-five different ways to bake elaborate cakes. There's somebody who really loves their golden retriever._

_Because love isn't your crap dad finally finding a use for you, and you needing to earn that. Because this is love: your mom brings latex gloves back from the hospital every night and never, ever stops holding your hand. Because it's stupid and horrible to be different, but it's also you. Because there are still people out here who are more interested in you than in what you can do for them._

And maybe emotions will always be something like a bullshit razor tripwire, a tangled jungle keeping both of them in the dark with other people, but Louis pushes every force of his feeling at her. And Lanie believes him.

 

***

 

You’ll wonder your whole life what you are.

Here’s what you are: special, which doesn’t make you better but does make you different. Alienated, because shitty people do that to the special and the different, and if you let them, they'll eat you alive and still be hungry. 

You won't let them. And why is that? It's always in the details. No one will be able to tell you what yours will be. You find them. Someone gives you a permanent affection for good coffee because you drink it during sessions. Someone doesn’t ever stop hugging you, even through blankets. Someone sits next to you in the cafeteria and doesn’t care if you feel their emotions or not, because there’s a mailbox with your name on it and a room to work in. And you've learned something from your mom, at least, because you'll accept a whole lot of pain to keep someone else from feeling it. But pay attention to the other side of what she taught you, the infinite space that you deserve. 

Even gifted kids grow up, and so do you. Your don't get to choose a lot of things but you get to choose this: who gets to have your power? Can it be you? 

 

***

 

The division gets a phone call from a gas station, sixty miles from the border. There’s a man and a girl and the man seems confused but harmless, sitting on the curb outside while she stays on the phone. Louis and Harry exchange faces that Louis is glad Liam isn’t around to see, because he’d get even more panicked. But Louis makes a note to reach out to the counselors, because a telempath who can _push_ emotions onto other people is worth a great deal more than money. 

Well. Aren’t they all.

“How are you?” Harry finally asks, hours later. Louis has just come out from a shower to find the wind died down and the cabin lit with a rising sun. Liam is off doing what Liam does best, logistics and search parties and swirling federal agencies. They've lost their internet completely, Harry’s closed the files up and stacked them on the kitchen counter: they’re _done._

“It’s just me now,” Louis says, feeling something tender on the inside. He waves a hand, dismissive, self-deprecating. He doesn’t know what to do with the way Harry’s looking at him, now that the adventure park ride of this strange case is closing behind them. “No magic.”

Harry has crossed the room before Louis has finished the sentence. He goes for the wrist. It is, Louis realizes belatedly, a tell; Harry always goes for his wrist. He catches Louis’ left arm in his right hand, fingers wrapped neatly into the hollow between the bone and the flare of Louis’ hand. He holds firm and pulling Louis’ arm tight between them. Harry’s other hand goes to the back of Louis’ head, grabbing into his hair, hungry and not at all careful. 

“You’re so fucking beautiful, and I want you,” Harry says, raw and unashamed. “I’ve wanted you for a goddamn long time and I think it’s time you let somebody else take care of you for a while.” 

There’s a noise that’s wholly involuntary and yet somehow encouraging out of Louis’ mouth. At that, Harry grins worse than Louis has ever seen him grin, deep dimples and all those teeth again. And then Harry’s kissing Louis. 

The world goes focused and lush in the space between one blink and the next. He kisses like he’s been planning it, like he’s needy for it. Louis sighs, opens his mouth and closes his eyes. Harry’s mouth is hot, and Louis can feel his fingers twitch.

“I, I want it too,” Louis says when they breathe again, blood rushing in his ears, with all the tremor of long absent intimacy.

“I know, you very bad liar,” Harry says. 

Harry's stronger than Louis-- _fuck,_ he’s a _lot_ stronger than Louis in this particular moment--so it’s all Louis can do to stay upright. Harry walks them backwards. Louis feels wrapped up in Harry and held up by his forearms, dragged fiercely but not carelessly. Louis digs his fingers into the yielding skin of Harry’s body and feels his breath catch in his lungs. The whole fucking case is finally over and it’s a rush of relief and endorphins and _being alive_ and the crashing intimacy of Harry’s body pushing into his. Louis kisses him back, again and again, helpless and eager. 

Every single thing about it is better than Louis’ imagination. Harry is an inexorable force of nature that’s walked them all the way back to the bed, banging Louis’ ankle in the process. Louis grabs Harry back, sighs into the bite of Harry’s teeth and the slick slide of his tongue. It’s not awful at all, being close. It’s _fantastic,_ it’s melting, it’s reducing him to an embarrassing friction of competing desires way too quickly. 

“This doesn’t mean I concede any of your other points,” Louis says. He has a vague thought that he should be something other than this, this wanting creature blinking quickly, but Harry’s grinning wolfishly down at him and Louis is on his back on the bed, so it can’t be too wrong. 

“Be with me,” Harry says. “Just you. Just you, and what you want, how about that? Haven’t you missed it? Haven’t you wanted it? Tell me everything you want.” 

“That sounds. I don’t know, sure, that sounds fine,” Louis says, too shaky for words. His fingers are crooking in, pulling at Harry’s skin and beckoning for more. He flushes a deep red, a cascading tenderness at how obvious and vulnerable he feels, but Harry’s eyes sweep over him with a demanding triumph. 

“ _I know_ , don’t worry, prodigy,” Harry says against Louis’ temple, kissing the curve of his cheekbone, brushing his hair from his face. “I’ll give you everything you deserve. Might take a while.”

“Shut up, you’re fucking intolerable,” Louis says, moving under Harry’s hands and pulling desperately at his clothes. 

“Oh I thought you loved talking about yourself,” Harry says, smug, but pulling Louis’ body close underneath him and rolling his thigh into the hot space of Louis’ groin, and grinding down. 

“Surely you’ve done enough of that,” Louis says, breathless and pretending not to be. Harry’s still pulling his hair, controlling the angle of how they kiss, because of _course_ he is. It’s been so long since Louis has felt this way that he’s not even sure if he’s _ever_ felt this way. He’s slammed into his body like there’s nothing else in the world but the way he feels on the surface of his skin. He’s shivering.

“I’ll tell you when it’s enough, how about,” Harry says. Louis is reasonably certain that Harry’s not being entirely honest, that Harry’s saying these things the way he’s saying them because of the low curl of uncertain enticement that it wraps around Louis’ spine. But Louis doesn’t _know,_ and it’s kind of magic, it’s kind of unbelievable, to hang in the ice-crystal storm with someone else, and not shatter. 

They get clothes off in a minute wherein Louis is fuzzy on the details, because Harry’s mostly still kissing him and holding him into the comforter, and Louis is mostly closing his eyes and letting it happen. He’s not fuzzy on Harry’s body, though, every detail jumping into clarity now that he’s allowed to look at it. Harry makes him feel small and held, wraps him up with long limbs and drugs him with slow kisses. The hot slide of his tongue puts goosebumps on Louis’ skin. 

Louis grabs for Harry’s back, slips his hands underneath Harry’s shirt and onto the stretch of his warm back, muscles thick and pleasing. Harry makes a pleased noise. Harry’s hand goes from Louis’ head and skitters down his body, landing over his hard cock and pressing down. 

It's been a long time and it's never been like _this_ at all, never been free of all the spider crawling feelings of somebody else. Louis garbles something hideous and embarrassing yet again. Harry kisses him _while grinning,_ the fiend. Louis bites his tongue, but not enough to really hurt.

“You can do better,” Harry says. Louis thrashes, a knee up to the groin, and Harry yelps. They’re lost for a moment to the marshmallow swamp of comforter and pillows until Harry gets the upper hand back, hair disheveled and something suspiciously like a bruise forming on his upper lip. 

“Oh I thought you _knew me,”_ Louis says. 

“Demon,” Harry says, holding Louis’ limbs down with all of his own, but he says it like he’s never been happier.

Harry winds his fingers into Louis’, presses their palms together and holds Louis’ hand above his head. And then he pauses, just looking at Louis’ face. It’s so novel that it’s shattering, being in bed with someone that Louis can’t _read._ He can feel the rise of Harry’s breath against his stomach, the slip of sweat between their hips and the line of his cock. He wants nothing more than _closer._

“What,” Louis whispers, licking his mouth, looking up at Harry, and then looking away. It’s ok, after all, if this is only a moment. It’s ok if they’re here, suspended in some kind of crazy Christmas snowglobe, just the two of them and the thick snow wrapped all around. But he’s not sure that he wants to hear about it just yet. 

“Happy, relieved, excited, really fucking desperate for you,” Harry whispers. Louis looks back at him, a slow smile curving his mouth. He draws a finger along Harry’s arm, and Harry draws a finger along his eyebrow, light and barely there. 

“Happy, desperate, _safe,”_ Louis says. 

Harry beams. It might light up the whole cabin. 

Thirty minutes later Louis is trying very hard to reach a pillow or _something_ which he can use, flailing underneath Harry, to get Harry to _fuck him already._

“Isn’t it difficult when you can’t just read minds and speak bullshit to get what you want,” Harry says, silky and mocking, as his fingers work smoothly into Louis, but not nearly far enough. 

"You're the one who brought sex supplies on a remote work trip," Louis hisses.   
  
"A remote work trip with  _you,"_ Harry says, "I have a lot of hope, enough hope for both of us." 

Louis writhes. His nerves are sparking like they’ve been exposed in the chill air. Harry grinds against him, a slide of bare stomach and thick thigh. Harry’s bit a series of bruises into his shoulders and Louis has returned the favor, but now he’s slowly but surely dying from unfulfilled need. Louis hears himself make a sound that’s horribly like a whimper. Harry swallows it, kisses Louis so deep that it feels like the rhythm of his lungs belongs to Harry too. 

“Don’t you even want it,” Louis gasps. Harry drags a filthy wet hand over Louis’ cock just enough to make him shudder and lose all words again. And Louis suspects Harry loves that. It’s electricity dancing through his veins, frisson in every joints of his bones. 

“Do I want it? Do I want _you?”_ Harry says, “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you. That sharp agent in the black sweater and the black pants, the one that everybody warned me about. Not a thread out of place, leaning over the table in the briefing room and scowling at everyone. All your monochrome outfits, all your fine lines and neat rules, like you could keep the world from noticing you. Like _I_ wouldn’t notice you, the shape of your mouth when you’re not saying what you really want to say. The movements of your hands in the air. I can’t even tell you how much I’ve wanted you.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Louis says, dazed, and god, he’s actually breathless again, it’s annoying and pathetic and _wonderful—_ “I am a delight and no one would ever warn anyone about me. And I would’ve known.” 

“Mhm,” Harry says, with a mocking lilt, but it’s like a shared secret and nothing vicious at all, soft despite the demanding weight of him, letting Louis know with every rock of his hips, how deeply Harry’s got him. “I did though. Drives me crazy in every way. But I must admit there’s something really captivating about _this._ You pinned beneath me, open and messy and nothing but what _you want_ in every move you make.” 

Harry’s eyelashes are dark. Louis can taste the inside of his mouth, wants to lick down the expanse of his skin. He clutches at Harry’s hips where he’s already left marks, presses the meat of his thigh up against Harry’s cock, and Harry pushes back. They’ve been torturing each other, on and on, but Louis is on fire and he can’t wait anymore. 

“Please,” Louis begs, finally. “Harry, I want it,” 

“You only had to _ask,”_ Harry says, his voice pleasure-deep. And then he’s _finally_ working on a condom and getting into the right position. Louis bites his lip to keep from making more awful noises but that's a lost battle because Harry gives it to him and he doesn't feel ready at all, but it's pure hot need. 

Harry pushes into him, biting the edge of his ear. Louis jolts, but it’s good, just a fierce movement and Harry holds him through it, whispers at the side of his face and coaxes him back down. Louis breathes out everything, all the loss and the imperfection and the things that he never thought he’d have again, and thinks that even if it’s only a moment, at least it’s an infinitely good one. 

Louis reaches up and up and up, finds Harry’s mouth to kiss, and presses his body into the beautiful quiet. 

“Just look at you,” Harry says. 

 

***

 

All things considered, getting rescued is a lot more anticlimactic than getting trapped. Liam hadn’t arranged an entire helicopter but he had actually arranged a private charter, a bouncy suspect plane that got them to a larger town, from which they could fly back like normal.  

Or not quite like normal. Harry switched his seat at the self-service kiosk while Louis hunted up and down the terminal for a decent pourover, complaining under his breath. When they got on the plane, Louis had the aisle and Harry had given himself the middle, right next to him.

They were too exhausted to talk, but Harry still kept his fingers pressed lightly against Louis’ wrist, so the stifling emotional noise of all the people around them was almost forgettable. Louis fell asleep for four hours and woke up, groggy, to the grey drizzle of the city. 

Louis is formally recused from the case and doesn’t honestly want to keep up with it, but he reviews the tapes from processing. Lanie Price is shuffled off to a veritable team of telempath therapists and sundry professionals, as well as the sincere solicitude of her mom. It's weird to see her, having known her. Louis knows with a kind of finality that he's letting her go forever, to make her brilliant path, but it's still profoundly reassuring that there's enough to think it’s all going to be ok: Lanie is shaken, will be shaken for a while, but she’s using agentic language. Her mom is checking herself every time she clearly has the urge to bombast in, in the manner of parents who want to pretend that nothing could be a threat to their children if only they opine hard enough. But she’s still checking herself, and that’s a blessing. That’s a rarity. Lanie Price is brilliant and still on the FBI track and if this becomes a formative moment, a turning point in her decisions about what she gives the rest of her life to and _who she does it for_ , well. Louis can’t blame her. They’re all trying to save somebody. 

Louis is put on leave, which he accepts with a lack of surprise. What does take him by surprise is that he accepts it without anything like a fight, and even has the godawful thought that Harry would be pleased about his lack of arguing. That thought gives him a warm glow of inexplicable origin.

It takes three days of mostly sleep for him to emerge from the haze and feel like he fully occupies himself and when he does, he also isn't surprised that there's no word from Harry. He pushes the disappointment down to the pit of his stomach and covers it with tea and the discovery that there are seasons going back _years_ of worried gentle people trying very hard to bake a dozen identical biscuits. 

It’s all right. It’s not….it’s not enough, but it’s all right. Louis sips a cup of hot tea and learns about tempering chocolate and feels grateful for every small moment of being present. 

The doorbell rings. Louis frowns. He isn’t expecting anything, and Liam had seemed awfully adamant about not calling him for a case for a while; Louis is gearing himself up for a very grey January. 

It’s a package, couriered with a signature and everything. Louis signs for it with a strange mounting sense of anticipation, because it’s an absolutely absurd box. Gold and red. Gold and red with _glitter_ on it. 

It’s _socks._ Black, because apparently Louis’ tastes actually count for something. They’re thick, high quality socks with a ribbing down the side and nearly warm enough to count as slippers. And there’s a return receipt. 

Louis is grinning even before he finds Harry’s note buried in the tissue paper. 

_It’s a gift,_ it reads, _but of course returnable. And one more thing if you want it, but I’ve gotta warn you, if you accept it, not likely you’ll be allowed to return it._

And then there’s…an address. Louis walks back over to the couch, to his black laptop, and taps the address into his all-access satellite feed. It looks exactly like he’d been told: an old red tiled roof on a big house, a backyard garden, and long, spreading fields of green all around. Louis tucks the socks under his arm, sips his tea, and watches the satellite feed. He feels a burning joy, flooding through his veins, filling up every space inside. 

He finishes his tea, packs a bag, and goes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here's a tumblr post for this fic!](https://helloamhere.tumblr.com/post/181715655578/etched-in-salt-is-a-cathedral-of-the-world-by)


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